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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 afa6b89c9edf7e5e…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.52 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-03-15
MD5: 17aa75488c665ffa62cc727538478d6c SHA-1: 91b4c527f418db0caa4a6eb6cb89dfc9c15dd71a SHA-256: afa6b89c9edf7e5e8dfd42cb8eec0979cac4f3bd7c800abf95e26468d7a1b019
110 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 PowerShell

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution when the object is processed. Although no VBA code was found to be executable, the presence of the vulnerable OLE object strongly indicates an attempt to exploit this known vulnerability for initial execution. The SHA256 hash is included as a primary indicator.

Heuristics 4

  • 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.
  • 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 2

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
a5c39ed96e5dd787e78d30910fe12418294d58fd7135ab0065e555df65a39853
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD011F539E/OLE10natIve 1624 bytes