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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5c13284e58107633…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.09 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-05
MD5: d12fa48232f532c61774b9a6b6cb01ac SHA-1: 13ccc069b807b507eb399fb066930d1f94ac7850 SHA-256: 5c13284e58107633a5845cef1fbf47954f4b492fa84764f8332da54a27e3ff3b
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.002 Malicious File T1566 Phishing T1566.002 Spearphishing Attachment

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object is designed to embed and deliver a secondary PDF payload, which itself exhibits suspicious static findings. The VBA macros are present but contain no executable statements, indicating the primary malicious functionality is within the OLE object.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • Secondary embedded PDF body has suspicious static findings critical POLYGLOT_CHILD_PDF_STATIC_TRIAGE
    A valid PDF body was found at a nonzero offset inside another container and its carved contents matched PDF exploit or lure heuristics. This catches polyglots where the top-level magic routes to ZIP/OLE while a PDF reader or downstream parser opens the hidden PDF payload.
  • 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.
  • Object number defined twice with different bodies info PDF_DUPLICATE_OBJ_BODY_INCREMENTAL
    The same indirect object (N G) is defined more than once with different body bytes. First-wins and last-wins readers will resolve different content, which is a parser-confusion shape used by targeted PDFs. Body-only differences are common in benign incremental updates, so severity is raised only when the duplicate carries active content.
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/

Extracted artifacts 8

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
5e69c56557f5539a65432dd2d4c0c0f18fe5e50dbdf9f792687940e38d62fa6f
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD000373BB/OLE10NatIve 1568 bytes
font_00_sfnt_off00012d55.bin
c770f9918a4512e864d5cb442b6b813020a99b29f560e058e4362ddfc8412387
pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x12D55 11884 bytes
font_01_sfnt_off00014ac4.bin
dd457e884a659b63f960fd1c1b3ba45b073ca5832921ee06c6cae7a7d12bd11f
pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x14AC4 15280 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00069200.pdf
9476ef25729ae9d7da08795959a15bbe0f481875057ef09d291a777b96031b2e
polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x69200 716288 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
bfb80e4c3819b0c6cbf458fc3bb6373212dcacb13c3d96e52d3ae4571f41ee05
polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1142784 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
ac277ed39a5877e4976c145f44f53a80921955decbe6b7a6fad27aa516c9154d
polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1121792 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off0000e200.pdf
a9bf1c85741daa36a1d08a01c7e3ea8407bec1fe15d5c490feb631ec48a08c68
polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0xE200 1089024 bytes