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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 d4bb6fcd2077fab4…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.08 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 2eb01e0a87e7c2c842bce6d75f34e083 SHA-1: df9ae618023a951ebacb254ec51ac1306c87cc73 SHA-256: d4bb6fcd2077fab4abe6012089f2bffbee52b0cc5b69ccc2b5e250672bee25be
68 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The critical heuristic firing indicates exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object, which is designed to download and execute a remote payload from a specified URL. The extracted URL is the primary indicator for the second-stage payload. Although VBA macros were present, they contained no executable statements, suggesting the exploit is directly embedded within the OLE structure.

Heuristics 2

  • 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.
  • 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 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes