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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 86fdff90584064c1…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.03 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-11-23
MD5: b18fd4de724718b8d1fa887d94731da4 SHA-1: 97377a93c7fe211badd89a8a3f6ac46e85ae1926 SHA-256: 86fdff90584064c135a98f05986da5a03bd67abe414f1d8f5fbdbf4249430019
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious File Execution T1059.005 Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object, which is a known vector for exploiting the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability. The heuristic firings strongly indicate the presence of this exploit. While VBA macros are present, they appear to be non-executable, suggesting the primary malicious functionality relies on the Equation Editor exploit itself.

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
ed8da65f0f0a4cc2a905cfcf1ae916bf05ced375ebeefae9a837c8bf84ad6699		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 3618 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
1b7b8781db4aba9c5455b0ba8f30eb4a8811f06df4e213a891687bf449594b8c		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0285B0EC/OLE10NAtIVe 1884 bytes

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