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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9ef7b881397f3ad7…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.11 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-07
MD5: e61ef35786f8c9fc93775070a5fbeec5 SHA-1: 8ced2497907895641391537efdc9c9a354892a88 SHA-256: 9ef7b881397f3ad7d7c7a0b4fa8b4f5d88077df7327fad30a16e8ee633a282b1
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1559.002 Component Object Model Hijacking

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object contains a secondary embedded PDF which exhibits suspicious static findings, indicating it is likely a malicious payload. No VBA macros were found to be executable, and no URLs were identified as malicious.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • 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 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 8

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
3892426f181a7234f94d8f707a62d608f3c69c47658dc941f9874198ddbf204e		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00145972/oLe10NAtive 1383 bytes
font_00_sfnt_off00012d55.bin
c770f9918a4512e864d5cb442b6b813020a99b29f560e058e4362ddfc8412387		 pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x12D55 11884 bytes
font_01_sfnt_off00014ac4.bin
dd457e884a659b63f960fd1c1b3ba45b073ca5832921ee06c6cae7a7d12bd11f		 pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x14AC4 15280 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off0006b200.pdf
6fbfb38e481301c0afec69d158611926161c1a513fa22203dbc961bb7da533aa		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6B200 729088 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
5b1238894704c5d061319d1756dc8dbb1df1c62b5d02daf0b1c76e3428a10944		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1163776 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
84280f8e3189afbd0f56fed768be97477a38fab32f819ec4947a3a0032865aa2		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1142784 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00008400.pdf
8346acb9d59ac2ffc365eadb6feba00f6d1e5252044b70d4d75c2f5ccd7ad483		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x8400 1134080 bytes

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