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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 42fbb3239ab4bb12…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.53 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-12-10
MD5: ae465e32dc3de258154e48707109ca1a SHA-1: 6222d992eb3873eeb960f7c27a7455f2b970ec0b SHA-256: 42fbb3239ab4bb12103399875c58de710805f2d97e6580c6e19c52e3745eb1c9
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate exploitation of CVE-2017-11882, a known vulnerability in the Equation Editor component. This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution when the malicious object is processed. No VBA macros were found to be executable, suggesting the exploit is directly within the OLE object.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
1d3b71b8c6234aace88f31f6e674b07383e015a2e68993dcd4fc2526aa470fe5		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 2412 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
dde63152fe113be4afa400a90924838634c42867254c1b5a1439ac6187d3e7f5		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0046D6F4/ole10NATIVE 1969 bytes

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