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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 80eddab7aab88378…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.13 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-10-24
MD5: 273306f64301b07d0090c49208a90653 SHA-1: 8b7216a4287be07e0f0a431f7c20741b761a88a6 SHA-256: 80eddab7aab8837892162226e2d3a08c610100a55ae7bbaaa24106c30d9e9b83
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.001 Malicious Link: Malicious Link T1566 Phishing T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object, which exploits CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability is known to be used for delivering secondary payloads, often via embedded documents like the suspicious PDF found within this file. No VBA macros were found to be executable, but the presence of the Equation Editor exploit is a strong indicator of malicious intent.

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://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/

Extracted artifacts 6

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
14e95fbd06affbe9a7f0486b965ad35d78321f7343fbdb270fa2d07c303e7769		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0012EDC7/oLE10NAtive 1768 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00049e00.pdf
27728861cadc0edf0a6d1fb532396ac66bd6de7785e72081a753dda766e304da		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x49E00 884736 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
83c301f90dce3cd203b63eb2c5171bed9dbe34ccbd2ededd383aed320dc57887		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1183232 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
d31f8f211566d2e4e048b7029fa2032f1704a5064e97d72501112ec7d68b182e		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1162240 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00008400.pdf
644d1046a1e443c1239e18b014b69db61e11a11d191b2645534d38995d166b51		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x8400 1153536 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.