Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 3d68e608a44d6133…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.13 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-10-25
MD5: a00539eb042cbbc907f275e9ae58ba5b SHA-1: b932409789c76805bf35c9fcd782e3a6680277b7 SHA-256: 3d68e608a44d61333eba2aad0422da21f20285e0e8a4a821c7f90bda6f643b59
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1559.002 Component Object Model Hijacking

The file contains an embedded Equation Editor OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object is used to deliver a secondary PDF payload, which itself exhibits suspicious static findings. No VBA macros were found to be executable, and the document body is minimal. The primary malicious activity appears to be the exploitation of the Equation Editor vulnerability.

Heuristics 6

  • Equation Editor Ole10Native payload — CVE-2017-11882 critical CVE likely CVE_2017_11882_EQUATION_OLE10NATIVE
    An embedded Microsoft Equation 3.0 object (CLSID 0002CE02-0000-0000-C000-000000000046) carries an Ole10Native packager stream instead of the normal Equation Native/MTEF data. This is the weaponized Equation Editor RCE delivery shape used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 maldocs. The payload (font-record overflow + shellcode) is frequently encrypted and the stream name case-scrambled to evade scanners, but an Equation object holding an Ole10Native stream has no benign use.
  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Contains Equation Editor object — related to CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploitation, but CLSID presence alone is not the malformed MTEF exploit primitive.
  • Secondary embedded PDF body has suspicious static findings critical POLYGLOT_CHILD_PDF_STATIC_TRIAGE
    A valid PDF body was found at a nonzero offset inside another container and its carved contents matched PDF exploit or lure heuristics. This catches polyglots where the top-level magic routes to ZIP/OLE while a PDF reader or downstream parser opens the hidden PDF payload.
  • VBA project contains no executable statements low OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains a VBA project, but extracted modules only contain attributes/options/comments and no executable statements.
  • Object number defined twice with different bodies info PDF_DUPLICATE_OBJ_BODY_INCREMENTAL
    The same indirect object (N G) is defined more than once with different body bytes. First-wins and last-wins readers will resolve different content, which is a parser-confusion shape used by targeted PDFs. Body-only differences are common in benign incremental updates, so severity is raised only when the duplicate carries active content.
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/

Extracted artifacts 6

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
75ff8fd5c168b96b2e6cf19eb5d11ac6049164ab892cfcdbb3957ff5e2c54677		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00245903/oLe10NATIVE 1525 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00049e00.pdf
1a62eda99cd4916a0398218da4b3db1eea1e23300947042efe19b56f03d4debb		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x49E00 884224 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
d7d15b00d47b444f3e15ca3f864f981e2991c4b92a305a05df4f50c44ed53d9a		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1182720 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
a02bb4d9484c04a53e621e17f6a5bac82e5aa834ab4b769fb5e141b11ec68531		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1161728 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00009600.pdf
167bb84942f45f9bb431d58c9a1093b2a48a571d88989c07e1d6f7dc692969d5		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x9600 1148416 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.