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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8468f6e913606e80…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.16 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-18
MD5: ecb215c449f5f2da3f17322b9e02fec6 SHA-1: 5baee7de1f257ded084326bef798c2740e919f5a SHA-256: 8468f6e913606e807195d7b49c4bed104e2dadb94a663000f7b173d37f447615
272 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1566.002 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object is used to deliver a secondary PDF payload which, in turn, contains a direct link to a suspicious URL. The VBA macros are benign, but the core functionality relies on the OLE object and the embedded PDF.

Heuristics 8

  • 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.
  • PDF link points directly to executable/archive payload critical PDF_DIRECT_PAYLOAD_LINK
    PDF contains a clickable HTTP(S) URI whose path ends in an executable, script, shortcut, disk image, or archive extension. Documents can legitimately link to installers, so this is a high-risk delivery indicator rather than a standalone exploit fingerprint.
  • Clickable PDF combines external action with parser-evasion structure high PDF_ACTION_PARSER_EVASION
    PDF has an external clickable URI together with object graph or xref structures that make parsers disagree, such as divergent duplicate objects, parser divergence, or xref offset mismatch. That combination is stronger than a plain link: the document is both an outward-action carrier and a parser-confusion/evasion sample.
  • 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 https://https://www.google.co.in/example.com
    • 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
63e15b26c053c93a5f366e2ee6c26d156b42e09330225fe7be08b14138a7c4fd		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0011378F/oLe10NAtIvE 1717 bytes
font_00_sfnt_off0000817d.bin
68d167e68895a344f3603a4efd0d8438eb8fdebe759cee48f2b4adf75c76c961		 pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x817D 12100 bytes
font_01_sfnt_off00009f95.bin
50551000b9f90b3f445ee94749557d9ddf96697a74984b3ccf3d2bae66910750		 pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x9F95 15820 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
2eb8581e12e8f300e67209f5112da423a0de33392698efa6e20a9e596ce9094f		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1207296 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
bc6f05c9c582d45de23f86181a10d5de73dbb174df9f4380098e321acf42d72e		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1186304 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off0000e600.pdf
bce34079df9addbdb75c01e5519f659e8b286d69a4ff25f13a9fa6014d5f0e79		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0xE600 1152512 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00023e00.pdf
65dfbd434e872e2dbbe488383a919954bdbbc7cc708c7c3c8b52c32a272c8083		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x23E00 1064448 bytes

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