RTF / .DOC malware analysis — malicious · 717a898666579b51

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

24.6 KB First seen: 2022-12-15

MD5: 41c3d9e467059722eb02afd48817148f SHA-1: ea0e976a6dc6247afe58b78dfa8a0b887d28a60b SHA-256: 717a898666579b51d511ec12ddf9d35abc16c8fd098a2b2516a5d5313ef1f99a

220 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK

T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 Service Execution: Visual Basic

The sample is an RTF document that leverages the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability in the Equation Editor. The presence of OLE object data and specific Equation Editor ProgIDs strongly indicates an attempt to exploit this known vulnerability for code execution. The document body contains a lure related to marketing strategy, but the primary malicious functionality is driven by the embedded exploit. No scripts were extracted, and the exploit itself is the main indicator of compromise.

Heuristics 6

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.
Split hex Equation Editor ProgID + OLE object critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR

RTF embeds the Equation.3 ProgID as hex bytes near OLE object activation and splits the byte stream with whitespace or an ignorable RTF group. This is an Equation Editor OLE activation surface commonly used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploit documents.
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
Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE

Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

Filename	Kind	Source	Size
`objdata_00_off00004f1c.bin` `b288704cf329fb951a3f9fc2e8797dd471eefe9ceeb6880bbbacdd720e113df9`	rtf-objdata-decoded	RTF \objdata at offset 0x4F1C	1400 bytes

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