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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8996729638cf0f62…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.35 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-08-22
MD5: 78703d75e8dcf000f6571304cb1c732f SHA-1: aa7d73b391eac3367db158e1da5627955a9c2e22 SHA-256: 8996729638cf0f623030fe6636b991077d7a0969b6d9238779b21b557ac9d15c
272 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.002 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.005 Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object is designed to deliver a secondary PDF payload, which in turn contains a direct link to a suspicious URL. The VBA macros are present but do not contain executable statements, suggesting the primary malicious functionality is within 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 6

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
53f8654404ddbd8da0e2c377a62d25c26eef14f1cc3f91efc11202bf65202cb8		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD001AD7F3/oLe10NaTiVE 1671 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off0005f200.pdf
235f7b4d5f7f9f1920782dceb5c159290f85a14965766a01e06caf5dc3f139ac		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x5F200 1029120 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
efceba00435feb06196cd874569da2e4624b9f720687d58bcf94cd85460ff31a		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1414656 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006400.pdf
29135b3df5402d6441ef1a9a42891b25924ca5bc0822edfd346e278b56a8cd91		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6400 1393152 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00019000.pdf
cdfd81022f11189f7f7e3aef3de15c0ccea78fa990dbf3fef1ebed09eab2eeb4		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x19000 1316352 bytes

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