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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 834a0ee59c88434f…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.06 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-03
MD5: 277e97a20c5a40e56a1003558ee7be82 SHA-1: 029d4950dc7aa9601f13bee9d4ebdc4c6c777f7d SHA-256: 834a0ee59c88434f737da258bf3e23f1d6a36120c6471be8f1a4f68d34c397a3
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 T1187 Exploitation for Client Execution

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 PDF itself exhibits multiple static findings, indicating it is also malicious and likely contains further exploit code or malicious content. No VBA macros were found to be executable, suggesting the primary attack vector is the Equation Editor vulnerability.

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
09ef0bee2b0b0f23e2afedd9cec81fc75bd93a6529ac547c1861351a8daf8c7b		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD006DDCBA/oLe10NatIvE 1767 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_off00061400.pdf
cc6062e8d67e7e537844825810f32561496d579754d1beb6a90c30b37a2fa72c		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x61400 716288 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
322aa8f61664e7917972ca78d6658cf3b55aa72c0e43eb9de98d4b23ce19d67d		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1110528 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006400.pdf
9c17833a063ac1f9ca69ec87c5e5bb724c64ba4abb1ce70fc4be8a84238b35b5		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6400 1089024 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00016200.pdf
437d374c639ba8e9616cef9a127ea7d13fbdb280e0de72d3b022fdba8fabc7cb		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x16200 1024000 bytes

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