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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 85ccb807d6156cb0…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

177.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-03-03
MD5: f5735d5be8c1a28b1de7e622d8c85384 SHA-1: 96732a0af04536a419585686571a625580be2a90 SHA-256: 85ccb807d6156cb031de1c9dff70ecc206dab4d812c681a2c520cccbd80aaad2
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object. Static analysis identified a critical heuristic firing for CVE-2017-11882, indicating exploitation of this known vulnerability. The VBA macros are present but contain no executable statements, suggesting the primary malicious functionality relies on the embedded OLE object.

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
bea73433eb3cc44a6a3937849741a1585d5e3297f051836601f697d2db5a8332		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00C9D41E/OlE10natiVe 1605 bytes

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