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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5995a9d659958284…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

943.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-02-22
MD5: f7dfcaa4c587f13cd21103742ebfcabd SHA-1: 41c9834dfef73d157d26c37065d83636c73e47c9 SHA-256: 5995a9d659958284ff528dbb126eb972603bfdcff825c10d6fcfd7a43c0e209b
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object. Static analysis identified the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability, indicating the file is designed to exploit this known flaw for initial execution. No VBA macros were found to be executable, and the document body was minimal, suggesting the primary attack vector is the embedded OLE object.

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
3f8cfcc36b21b1fdbfac4a957dd0544bc2a6d036c85dbb1554dc872d76686e2c		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00EB9470/OLe10nATiVe 1480 bytes

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