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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 94a9994c3238a6fb…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.15 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 56eb4cf3ab338e8baf71f90b692e16a6 SHA-1: fab6d948de9c0a8ca3638f8195dade67c5b24120 SHA-256: 94a9994c3238a6fbe227104360f5072e78e7bd60c2f4e6be7146b893d91dae54
68 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The critical heuristic firing indicates exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object. This technique is used to load remote content, as evidenced by the extracted URL. The VBA project, while not containing executable statements directly, is part of the exploit chain. The sample's purpose is to act as a remote loader for a secondary payload.

Heuristics 2

  • OLE2Link / URL Moniker → remote loader — CVE-2017-0199 critical CVE likely CVE_2017_0199
    Document contains an embedded OLE link object whose URL Moniker points to a remote URL. When the host file is opened, Office follows the link, downloads the URL, and processes the response based on its Content-Type (HTA -> mshta.exe, RTF → Word, etc.) — the documented CVE-2017-0199 primitive. The URL extension is not a reliable filter; servers can return different payloads to Office's user agent.
  • 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 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes