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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4f0e279aed831043…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.04 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-02-08
MD5: 29fad68d4ff9961570ee552b0a1c651b SHA-1: 57812728eef6c0346b625706453ec667cfd95578 SHA-256: 4f0e279aed83104309fa55a22e3a96819beb5f97fe229d9f0e7231c934d4e091
110 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 PowerShell

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution when the object is processed. No VBA macros were found to be executable, and the document body is minimal, suggesting the primary attack vector is the Equation Editor exploit itself.

Heuristics 4

  • 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.
  • 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://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 2

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
1b57d4435f06824bc7b1feb1c72488b15f7c4ef44681ef98dc8149a68a9795d0
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD01C7B1BE/oLe10NativE 1781 bytes