Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8abf255fdeb74678…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

1.96 MB
MD5: 06c9ba7db7d3f61c4df46371ec580243 SHA-1: a64b7aabdabd977b782bed6e8c416b2deb64ea0d SHA-256: 8abf255fdeb746788534b1e166ceaf0393194cf1596dee1a8d0595eb6189d9d3
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The critical heuristic RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR and high heuristic CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED indicate exploitation of CVE-2017-11882. The presence of OLE object data and the ".objupdate" directive further support this, suggesting the RTF document is designed to trigger an embedded OLE object for malicious execution. The decoded object data contains obfuscated VBScript-like content that appears to attempt to download and execute a second-stage payload, though the exact URL is not fully reconstructible from the provided snippet.

Heuristics 5

  • 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 2 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Embedded OLE object medium RTF_OBJEMB
    RTF contains \objemb — embedded OLE object

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00001116.bin
30df5cf9566077ce21e5f887ff53fffb38bf9ed2560cc69a7b29d8c81d743883		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x1116 25553 bytes
objdata_01_off0001917f.bin
ac9bfb081d4e3f91c1d530b09d33124ea631b81e03f3efc0b3eee9f29b094bb3		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x1917F 463381 bytes

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