Formbook — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cb4cdbac395362af…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

190.7 KB
MD5: 3d957ad7193622f1534d628128304012 SHA-1: 9447b716c56c124bcaad18ff032ac74ad459ab6a SHA-256: cb4cdbac395362af8abb690b004e47d12f0553ffd51247fce05867812fc7b21f
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Formbook · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious File T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The file is a password-encrypted Office XLSX document that contains an embedded Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate this object is malformed and exhibits anomalies consistent with CVE-2018-0798, suggesting it's an exploit carrier. ClamAV detection confirms this is a Formbook downloader. The encryption and malformed OLE object are used to disguise the malicious content and evade detection.

Heuristics 7

  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Default-encrypted OOXML embedded OLE object xl/embeddings/oleObject1.bin contains the Equation Editor CLSID, the legacy component exploited by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0802, and CVE-2018-0798.
  • CVE-2018-0798 — anomalous Equation Editor native stream high CVE likely CVE_2018_0798_EQUATION_NATIVE_ANOMALY
    Default-encrypted OOXML contains embedded Equation Editor data with anomalous native stream bytes consistent with a CVE-2018-0798-style exploit. This is treated as likely CVE evidence because the Equation object is malformed and payload-like.
  • Encrypted Office package with CFB FAT corruption critical OLE_ENCRYPTED_AND_MALFORMED
    Encrypted-package shape co-occurs with FAT-chain corruption — the documented combined evasion form.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Formbook-bc97c1e0c33c3c93-9951465-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Formbook-bc97c1e0c33c3c93-9951465-0
  • Default-encrypted OOXML exploit carrier layout high OOXML_ENCRYPTED_EXPLOIT_CARRIER_SHAPE
    Default-password encrypted OOXML package contains embedded OLE object parts and additional activation/decoy parts. This layout is common in malicious Excel exploit delivery and requires inspecting the decrypted package.
  • Office document is password-encrypted medium OFFICE_ENCRYPTED_PACKAGE
    OLE container holds MS-OFFCRYPTO encrypted package (Standard Encryption (Office 2007, AES)).
  • Office OOXML encrypted with default VelvetSweatshop password medium OFFICE_DEFAULT_PASSWORD_ENCRYPTED_OOXML
    OLE EncryptedPackage decrypts with Excel's built-in VelvetSweatshop password. Office opens this transparently, and malware uses it to hide OOXML exploit parts from scanners that only inspect the outer OLE container.