Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 88003bce7c9a3c2b…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

34.0 KB First seen: 2022-12-12
MD5: fc95659ec181262b20b0a58b4f52c2c3 SHA-1: d077f3c5331b7a3dc547aafcf5f77f92194c40e0 SHA-256: 88003bce7c9a3c2b4b28443a3919ba186c14abf477b25c7f3e8a8fdeeb2b67fe
200 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File

The RTF document contains an embedded OLE object specifically targeting the Equation Editor vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882). The presence of \objupdate and the critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR heuristic indicate that the document is designed to exploit this vulnerability upon opening, likely to download and execute a secondary payload. The document body itself contains a lure to enable editing, further supporting its role as a malicious dropper.

Heuristics 6

  • Equation Editor activation — CVE-2017-11882 related high CVE related CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID and requests OLE activation with \objemb plus \objupdate. This reaches the legacy Equation Editor attack surface used by CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802 documents, but the malformed MTEF/native payload needed for stronger attribution was not recovered.
  • Split hex Equation Editor ProgID + OLE object critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF embeds the Equation.3 ProgID as hex bytes near OLE object activation and splits the byte stream with whitespace or an ignorable RTF group. This is an Equation Editor OLE activation surface commonly used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploit documents.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Embedded OLE object medium RTF_OBJEMB
    RTF contains \objemb — embedded OLE object
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off000059f1.bin
c03a520111ec5cf6dca7b3c1091c6347e6ca287a38f759d04a3da47e9e25b9bf		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x59F1 1694 bytes

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