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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c996e20b5362793c…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

165.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-02-20
MD5: f7f648ed2c87ef9bfcd3eacc6cb34965 SHA-1: 56edbad9a0d6f309577344844934899f454b2988 SHA-256: c996e20b5362793c89378f9bd70917b83efb359810885e33b3e3c42092364c11
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability allows for the execution of arbitrary code when the object is rendered. No VBA macros were found to be executable, but the presence of the vulnerable OLE object is sufficient for exploitation. The embedded artifact is a binary payload that is likely executed upon rendering the Equation Editor.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.

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
3349997800c1fccaa68d4bfaf9535d5cb021f8e6e118360ca0949cb70839028c		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0048F157/OLE10Native 1375 bytes

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