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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8540aa2de62ca199…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

90.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-01-19
MD5: 4caadb865cf9ea6aa193d18cc2318fa7 SHA-1: 340d02b116cf070a7b420b8440da87d924510c74 SHA-256: 8540aa2de62ca19964455bf4484179eaa21419eae032cd328505409e0e9059a6
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 PowerShell

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object. This object exploits the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability, which is known to execute arbitrary code. No VBA macros were found to be executable, and the document body is empty, indicating the exploit is the primary delivery mechanism. The embedded OLE object likely serves as a dropper for a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 2

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
b2495b25486ad9b06f678b83e05ea24750fe531b33a9c3746f8fa4cf0828016e		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD02665C6D/oLE10NAtive 1634 bytes

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