Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a14cd27a7109a856…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

71.7 KB
MD5: 581b35d5ddce551ed48766f2416692f7 SHA-1: 2dcd8a3884d870263a12f0f26ddfea5e48f791b7 SHA-256: a14cd27a7109a8561ad9cda4686eda40e083b4ec0cd8d29dcb28627b68321932
122 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.003 Windows Command Shell

The sample is an RTF document that leverages the Equation Editor vulnerability (RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR) to execute arbitrary code. The ".objupdate" heuristic indicates that the embedded OLE object is designed to be activated automatically, likely to trigger the exploit. The decoded object contains a PE file, suggesting the document's primary purpose is to download and execute a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 4

  • Decoded Equation Editor payload + PE critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF decodes to an Equation Editor ProgID adjacent to OLE activation and the same decoded object stream contains embedded PE bytes. This matches the Equation Editor exploit surface used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 documents, while requiring payload evidence to avoid flagging benign Equation references.
  • \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 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00001ab4.bin
a5374488e61f62a9e1e945571566283d2f28fdb0c2447ffc7c71e13a56e30764
rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x1AB4 33023 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact entropy is 7.99, consistent with packed or encrypted content.