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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cad18f5e1d6c550c…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

179.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-01-20
MD5: 72d040688db8fc60007c8bde8c101f92 SHA-1: c89427f27728b92325e529eea41747bbf3fc5725 SHA-256: cad18f5e1d6c550caa3ce01d234e45d7c8ba34cd26428b00e9aa8765ea036bf1
110 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object. Static analysis identified a critical heuristic firing for CVE-2017-11882, indicating exploitation of this known vulnerability. The embedded VBA macro, though not containing executable statements itself, is likely a component of the exploit chain. The primary attack vector is the exploitation of CVE-2017-11882 for client-side execution.

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://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

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
62db0bde44b6caee2ce52f8360f9585f000061d2be3005ed2dadfe72e3a41778
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0024B5B3/olE10NATIVE 1855 bytes