Malicious RTF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5167eca4474d002b…

MALICIOUS

RTF

3.9 KB First seen: 2022-03-11
MD5: 316efb87b84afd6dce8bf78a2c4e336f SHA-1: 7febf22b522c67a4c6383f913576cff924b5f457 SHA-256: 5167eca4474d002bb75169c617837d2eb52f9ebfb5cc5cc975f2af8d184dadaa
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1559.002 Component Object Model and Distributed Component Object Model

The RTF file contains an embedded OLE object specifically identified as related to Equation Editor, triggering heuristics for CVE-2017-11882. The presence of \objupdate and \objdata sections indicates that the embedded object is designed to be activated, leading to arbitrary code execution. The specific class 'EQuatiON.3' is a strong indicator of this exploit.

Heuristics 5

  • Equation Editor activation — CVE-2017-11882 related high CVE related CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID and requests OLE activation with \objemb plus \objupdate. This reaches the legacy Equation Editor attack surface used by CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802 documents, but the malformed MTEF/native payload needed for stronger attribution was not recovered.
  • Split hex Equation Editor ProgID + OLE object critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF embeds the Equation.3 ProgID as hex bytes near OLE object activation and splits the byte stream with whitespace or an ignorable RTF group. This is an Equation Editor OLE activation surface commonly used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploit documents.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 2 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Embedded OLE object medium RTF_OBJEMB
    RTF contains \objemb — embedded OLE object

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00000084.bin
d894420a668e69081d1bfef572961d246becf9d30bb259ed90d69a2da0ad3320		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x84 1798 bytes

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