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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6f9574f0ec27d13a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.09 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-04
MD5: 1f48088d23310d1217509d1b962f3450 SHA-1: 185ab0c5a2da8b901ad5a344b2931858ee662e95 SHA-256: 6f9574f0ec27d13a966f09787ceace0505ba20791b3327531a55374f33d319f3
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.001 Malicious Link: Malicious Link T1559 Component Object Model Hijacking T1559.001 Component Object Model Hijacking: Component Object Model Hijacking T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter T1059.005 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object is designed to drop and execute a secondary payload, identified as a suspicious PDF file. The VBA macros are present but do not contain executable statements, indicating the exploit is likely within the OLE object itself. The embedded PDF also exhibits suspicious static findings, suggesting it is the primary malicious component.

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
c0ae2bab56f5ea621154c36b5fae5be59f59430a07d4f024960965e993401831		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00060B76/oLE10nAtive 1444 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
5a49df8d1321dad00496c51ee8b58e6d5a5538dc303783971841fad74fb5bfe7		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x69200 716288 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
2dea026b28404f6a4e4d74ce52bbec16a210d7e14ff40b501ec3b06912dc0c86		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1142784 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
ae7d6f43cdecef5ee1022d78dabf742fb242a4bc100e23c44138747cf087e45a		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1121792 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off0000e200.pdf
14f808e89eb657a07d32e0d3a8c9999e7d600f9abf2e4a6280c463079c5ecbb0		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0xE200 1089024 bytes

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