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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 3f8a841fab1cbd1d…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

379.5 KB First seen: 2022-06-09
MD5: b0b71faed7ccf2d0e45fc758db6b31b3 SHA-1: 189f1a6ac18d99ee8aa4479c73526a6f9f1671c6 SHA-256: 3f8a841fab1cbd1d735e2ebdf9493976a96bfa6c2cc0a1dcb776ad0366506099
220 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1559.001 Component Object Model Hijacking

The sample is an encrypted Office document that contains an Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate it is an exploit carrier for CVE-2018-0798, leveraging anomalous Equation Editor native stream data. The encryption and malformed structure suggest an attempt to obscure the malicious payload.

Heuristics 6

  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Default-encrypted OOXML embedded OLE object xl/embeddings/oleObject1.bin contains the Equation Editor CLSID, the legacy component exploited by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0802, and CVE-2018-0798.
  • CVE-2018-0798 — anomalous Equation Editor native stream high CVE likely CVE_2018_0798_EQUATION_NATIVE_ANOMALY
    Default-encrypted OOXML contains embedded Equation Editor data with anomalous native stream bytes consistent with a CVE-2018-0798-style exploit. This is treated as likely CVE evidence because the Equation object is malformed and payload-like.
  • Encrypted Office package with CFB FAT corruption critical OLE_ENCRYPTED_AND_MALFORMED
    Encrypted-package shape co-occurs with FAT-chain corruption — the documented combined evasion form.
  • Default-encrypted OOXML exploit carrier layout high OOXML_ENCRYPTED_EXPLOIT_CARRIER_SHAPE
    Default-password encrypted OOXML package contains embedded OLE object parts and additional activation/decoy parts. This layout is common in malicious Excel exploit delivery and requires inspecting the decrypted package.
  • Office document is password-encrypted medium OFFICE_ENCRYPTED_PACKAGE
    OLE container holds MS-OFFCRYPTO encrypted package (Standard Encryption (Office 2007, AES)).
  • Office OOXML encrypted with default VelvetSweatshop password medium OFFICE_DEFAULT_PASSWORD_ENCRYPTED_OOXML
    OLE EncryptedPackage decrypts with Excel's built-in VelvetSweatshop password. Office opens this transparently, and malware uses it to hide OOXML exploit parts from scanners that only inspect the outer OLE container.