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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 975daaa9be0e62c1…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.46 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-12-01
MD5: 3a469e186a118a3a0b7684b0fc38f7d2 SHA-1: 7d3eb1c8c25c0f892beb82e8b051fead2b8a94db SHA-256: 975daaa9be0e62c157b84e92c7c48ce947f8c5b6d66692756e751f0bd4f14596
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object, which is a known vector for exploiting CVE-2017-11882. The VBA macros are present but do not contain executable statements, indicating the primary malicious functionality is within the embedded OLE object. The file's structure and the critical heuristic firing strongly suggest it's designed to exploit this specific vulnerability to deliver a secondary payload.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • 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 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
158031d093f77166d1905e369838b66775c0e6bc524b3e1c70af1ad7a2349266		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 4824 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
a74203ecfd5dc1841355fc36eed331cc2ad1284ac694cff4535b293d5e6ef681		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD01E67E6A/Ole10Native 1566 bytes

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