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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6baa921b2a5309df…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

846.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 66b909b18dadca0f5fd69af9ed1afa81 SHA-1: a8ff90ddf3fbf67e0dd5574b511914fa08d9de3d SHA-256: 6baa921b2a5309dfa942555c0a21bc59b136fb3997d47ecc54a9dba901b7f534
112 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 Visual Basic

The file exploits CVE-2017-0199, a known vulnerability for remote code execution, by leveraging a URL moniker to download a secondary payload. The embedded VBA macro, while not containing executable statements itself, is likely a component of the exploit chain. The secondary embedded PDF also contains suspicious findings, suggesting a multi-stage attack. The primary IOC is the URL used in the exploit.

Heuristics 5

  • 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.
  • Secondary embedded PDF body has suspicious static findings high 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/exif/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceEvent#
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/
    • http://www.extensis.com/meta/FontSense/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/photoshop/1.0/

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
polyglot_child_pdf_off000a9200.pdf
2f80ecebed7e99b5baabe792ccb64a209270d38510ca93a84ede89848c499903		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0xA9200 173568 bytes

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