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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 52961acf09669a6a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

569.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-11-15
MD5: 842ceaab0f222683fc08f6a72737d133 SHA-1: eb66c53fadf146b6fd0fa2e5a5a247a67cf753c5 SHA-256: 52961acf09669a6a51ceb24016f949184b0803186ffbd8b6774ae27939256dd7
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a Microsoft Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object. Static analysis identified a critical heuristic firing for CVE-2017-11882, indicating exploitation of this vulnerability. The VBA macros were found to contain no executable statements, suggesting the exploit is directly within the OLE object. The primary attack vector is the exploitation of the Equation Editor vulnerability to achieve code execution.

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
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
52722e292f39b6bf49236f4031ae6fc6ea7ca2beeaf4003d33320103f0533030		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0199A242/olE10naTIVE 1822 bytes

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