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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 aba62046d9f708f8…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.13 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-10-25
MD5: dd34582cae54aacb25f28f9fff09bddd SHA-1: 848e88d9f9576bdb77a36a4261295c1feb000940 SHA-256: aba62046d9f708f874b87f53dfab7193eed0ffd6fac02635f3bb54fc197ae569
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1566 Phishing T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.005 Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object contains a payload that, when triggered, likely delivers a secondary malicious PDF. The VBA project itself contains no executable statements, indicating the primary malicious functionality is within the OLE object.

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://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/

Extracted artifacts 6

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
a9874f3c02046082653ddf7d00b3520d849cc56885e14fd9fa241892f70b9a34		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0038099D/OLE10Native 1375 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00049e00.pdf
0d61d0588e681b27745a7bbb2eb86735cf0cb5a2d1d99d545a943441fb494b9b		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x49E00 884224 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
aa971039f56fd568ead8533fa69084ec9ff3f1c04fe2a8423e7aaf3ec901df0e		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1182720 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
cf5277b151dcec91f0a591c32af80bf7f395284f5d7b9a6c11cf8688dea16d8c		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1161728 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00009600.pdf
57097a5c9ae1615b9253f15917df555dc5771d61f9dbb31f981e3dec911ac507		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x9600 1148416 bytes

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