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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8e7014e08a51ed78…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

181.5 KB First seen: 2022-06-16
MD5: 3bdd4244de89e373f4342337cbc40f55 SHA-1: 5c324f13a62bcfc0af11c825d9ee0509aba00eea SHA-256: 8e7014e08a51ed78c911911e7dbe15dbd35dc111d8aa58e2b650d5be1cea9635
160 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1559.001 Component Object Model Hijacking

The file is an encrypted Office document that contains an Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate that this object is anomalous and specifically matches the characteristics of CVE-2018-0798, an exploit targeting the Equation Editor. This suggests the document is designed to exploit this vulnerability for initial execution.

Heuristics 5

  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Default-encrypted OOXML embedded OLE object xl/embeddings/oleObject1.bin contains the Equation Editor CLSID, the legacy component exploited by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0802, and CVE-2018-0798.
  • CVE-2018-0798 — anomalous Equation Editor native stream high CVE likely CVE_2018_0798_EQUATION_NATIVE_ANOMALY
    Default-encrypted OOXML contains embedded Equation Editor data with anomalous native stream bytes consistent with a CVE-2018-0798-style exploit. This is treated as likely CVE evidence because the Equation object is malformed and payload-like.
  • Default-encrypted OOXML exploit carrier layout high OOXML_ENCRYPTED_EXPLOIT_CARRIER_SHAPE
    Default-password encrypted OOXML package contains embedded OLE object parts and additional activation/decoy parts. This layout is common in malicious Excel exploit delivery and requires inspecting the decrypted package.
  • Office document is password-encrypted medium OFFICE_ENCRYPTED_PACKAGE
    OLE container holds MS-OFFCRYPTO encrypted package (Standard Encryption (Office 2007, AES)).
  • Office OOXML encrypted with default VelvetSweatshop password medium OFFICE_DEFAULT_PASSWORD_ENCRYPTED_OOXML
    OLE EncryptedPackage decrypts with Excel's built-in VelvetSweatshop password. Office opens this transparently, and malware uses it to hide OOXML exploit parts from scanners that only inspect the outer OLE container.