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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 45a796cfb9054cdc…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

1.32 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f418cd19df82eb19912cc303f2d19595 SHA-1: d034e4a9fed9111a7dd36f008de7f64a61fc049c SHA-256: 45a796cfb9054cdce2c34e44cb602778f006ebc13467db409cb6eab81956995f
68 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.005 Visual Basic

The critical heuristic firing indicates exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object, which attempts to load a remote resource from the URL 'https://isinstance.com/zZvLGk?&samurai=efficient&comfort'. Although the VBA project contains no executable statements, the presence of the OLE2Link exploit suggests the file is designed to act as a loader for a secondary stage payload. The file is an Excel spreadsheet, and the exploit targets a vulnerability in how Office applications handle OLE objects and URL monikers.

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