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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 54f847b9372a1460…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

211.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-05-24
MD5: ae479e192af24b29892b68de48158698 SHA-1: 60132db46c56dad678ca468aebcbf5fecaed5eec SHA-256: 54f847b9372a1460f018337a4c982a05d03866a514dc28e34dfced5f44a9b492
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious File T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter

The critical heuristic firing indicates the presence of a payload exploiting CVE-2017-11882 within an Equation Editor OLE object. While the VBA macros themselves contain no executable statements, the embedded OLE object is the primary vector for exploitation. This suggests the file is designed to leverage this known vulnerability to execute a secondary payload.

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
1810d1f580eaa978b9ce4b99295f6b97146c0eb6028c2020749bad56239cec48
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0027786D/olE10NaTiVe 2065 bytes