Malicious RTF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6cec065a8ea31b5a…

MALICIOUS

RTF

375.2 KB First seen: 2019-05-16
MD5: ee1f8c8a5fa70fde3e4394eb8cb11910 SHA-1: 8cf3a357ac129784ac2c22cd497de2d2d36a10d0 SHA-256: 6cec065a8ea31b5acdbf0f5c2b1bede973d0f586a770286dddbb264ce16e6152
200 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The RTF document contains an embedded OLE object that triggers the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability in Microsoft Equation Editor. This vulnerability is known to be used to execute arbitrary code, typically to download and run a second-stage payload. The presence of the 'eQUatioN.3' ProgID strongly indicates this exploit.

Heuristics 5

  • Obfuscated Equation Editor ProgID + activation critical CVE related RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID from top-level \objdata hex after nested RTF junk groups are ignored, and the document also contains \objemb plus \objupdate activation. This is an obfuscated Equation Editor exploit surface associated with CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 families, but no exact malformed MTEF CVE primitive was recovered from this object.
  • Equation Editor activation — CVE-2017-11882 related high CVE related CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID and requests OLE activation with \objemb plus \objupdate. This reaches the legacy Equation Editor attack surface used by CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802 documents, but the malformed MTEF/native payload needed for stronger attribution was not recovered.
  • Automatically linked OLE object high RTF_OBJAUTLINK
    RTF contains \objautlink — an automatically linked OLE object surface that can be updated or activated when Word opens the document.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00001cbf.bin rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x1CBF 2199 bytes
SHA-256: 0fe1045c3799813d452db0f01162d94644943f17598ec6fd2ab08f57a08d9552