Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 710fc2856acae1af…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

4.0 KB First seen: 2023-01-20
MD5: ce49c0f6fc0c4d8e808b3f1ca4bae1ae SHA-1: e139a0afa0783454a51fcc9d87cd729cd7bcf31a SHA-256: 710fc2856acae1af7e82eae7657f70b479df4cb2df9b357279feb37b3e5af53f
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File

The RTF document contains an embedded OLE object that leverages the Equation Editor vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882). The presence of RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR and CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED heuristics strongly indicates exploitation of this known vulnerability. The objupdate directive further suggests that the embedded object is designed to be activated automatically, leading to arbitrary code execution.

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.
  • \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
  • Embedded OLE object medium RTF_OBJEMB
    RTF contains \objemb — embedded OLE object

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off0000006e.bin
41bfe3830e69285822843c271fd8824862ec807dcc25d65d93fe912ceca6aeb1		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x6E 1944 bytes

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