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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 52c2957760924575…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.33 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: c1f2ac31e48fae35e13a09e25a552826 SHA-1: 74968830013daab7e5aab4bfd9229b4e792096e3 SHA-256: 52c2957760924575bff0c5b6707337326df5104ccefea6c5f412989da9440250
68 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1059.005 PowerShell T1071.001 Web Protocols

The critical heuristic firing indicates exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object, which attempts to load a remote resource. The extracted URL points to a potential second-stage payload. Although no VBA macros were found to be executable, the presence of the exploit and the remote URL strongly suggest a downloader or initial access mechanism.

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