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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4591e37bd5cb31cf…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

986.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 309a317c4af76bac2a4bbc50165553fb SHA-1: 1c51fd2a77d657a1d199da7324d7b820bd4ecf89 SHA-256: 4591e37bd5cb31cf68b7d16a79d57a70113cb82ff5d72d4aca62b252f62e84db
68 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1059.005 PowerShell T1059.001 PowerShell T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1059.004 Python

The critical heuristic firing indicates exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object, which is designed to download and execute a remote loader from the provided URL. Although no VBA macros were found to be executable, the presence of the exploit and the external URL strongly suggests a malicious intent to compromise the system by fetching and running a secondary payload. The document body was unreadable, providing no further context on the lure.

Heuristics 2

  • OLE2Link / URL Moniker → remote loader — CVE-2017-0199 critical CVE likely CVE_2017_0199
    Document contains an embedded OLE link object whose URL Moniker points to a remote URL. When the host file is opened, Office follows the link, downloads the URL, and processes the response based on its Content-Type (HTA -> mshta.exe, RTF → Word, etc.) — the documented CVE-2017-0199 primitive. The URL extension is not a reliable filter; servers can return different payloads to Office's user agent.
  • 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 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes