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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c068d679b4f42281…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

414.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-09-15
MD5: fca2b03962652e3b7335e46bacef4f0e SHA-1: de60ac4b87df21b394bcfe474af3d9f4e4bbb4a3 SHA-256: c068d679b4f422817edd3c3103930087c0b1229c3037e4940fe3e2c41fc0395c
132 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is an Excel file that exploits CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object to download a remote payload from the URL https://mub.me/t3K. The embedded VBA macros are present but do not contain executable statements, suggesting they are not the primary execution vector. The presence of a secondary embedded PDF with suspicious static findings further indicates a multi-stage attack.

Heuristics 5

  • OLE2Link / URL Moniker → remote loader — CVE-2017-0199 critical CVE likely CVE_2017_0199
    Document contains an embedded OLE link object whose URL Moniker points to a remote URL. When the host file is opened, Office follows the link, downloads the URL, and processes the response based on its Content-Type (HTA -> mshta.exe, RTF → Word, etc.) — the documented CVE-2017-0199 primitive. The URL extension is not a reliable filter; servers can return different payloads to Office's user agent.
  • 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 https://mub.me/t3K

Extracted artifacts 4

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes
stream_003_off00005f60.bin
2998a126f4fa11ceb265371a5f7968ec18bc4692a32631a544232dc74040021f		 decompressed-pdf-stream PDF FlateDecoded stream at offset 0x5F60 252488 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00000e00.pdf
cfc9e097a510b3dd25654850a2cdfb69d01d83545c409f14789549035d873087		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0xE00 420352 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006400.pdf
b1e885b7f18ef8cafcea9c7a9f21042b7fee57b09445a05c53456c6891dd2116		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6400 398336 bytes

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