equation editor exploit — RTF malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6ec144c5ca5a7ce3…

MALICIOUS

RTF

8.4 KB First seen: 2020-04-06
MD5: 608d61e92b9146193f80067c5c6893ef SHA-1: 9f72eb74191327090cc479db9d428af65364cc93 SHA-256: 6ec144c5ca5a7ce3a2f33f97372968be7a54d63dee8967dbcc4f304ea64c20a2
120 Risk Score

Malware Insights

equation editor exploit · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The RTF file contains an embedded OLE object with a CLSID indicative of the Equation Editor. The presence of \objupdate suggests that the embedded object is designed to be activated, triggering the exploitation of a known vulnerability in the Equation Editor. This technique is commonly used to achieve arbitrary code execution on the victim's machine.

Heuristics 3

  • Equation Editor CLSID critical CVE likely RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Equation Editor OLE CLSID found inside an OLE object — exploited by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 / CVE-2018-0798
  • \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_off00000032.bin rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x32 4145 bytes
SHA-256: 4c998a12b897b4a42dbeb286eefde7201b33182fffa718640359d4e04f40d0ef

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