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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 d98ff79f6df2c0c3…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.00 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-08
MD5: 596b6abebab4a96892c094554bc84bed SHA-1: 43b19f58cd3862e18a48cbc660b9e9e312709b89 SHA-256: d98ff79f6df2c0c34471f8b07c9673b51a8ebf48c3049f51d18f937ceb702e6b
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious File T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious Attachment T1566 Phishing T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882 in the Equation Editor. This exploit is designed to deliver a secondary payload, identified as a suspicious PDF file. The VBA macros are present but do not contain executable statements, indicating the primary malicious functionality is within the OLE object.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • 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 http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/

Extracted artifacts 8

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
eb2a3d0c7ac64e7192988185ffdbfd16ddfaf53fa2d8d057b5c33e0849100138		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0019415E/ole10natIvE 1318 bytes
font_00_sfnt_off00012d55.bin
c770f9918a4512e864d5cb442b6b813020a99b29f560e058e4362ddfc8412387		 pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x12D55 11884 bytes
font_01_sfnt_off00014ac4.bin
dd457e884a659b63f960fd1c1b3ba45b073ca5832921ee06c6cae7a7d12bd11f		 pdf-font-stream PDF embedded font (sfnt) at offset 0x14AC4 15280 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00063e00.pdf
562e662b7f5614176a1691a99a8ce47570ea549bc35a487b89a84550d31d0109		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x63E00 643584 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
03d0070fe806d4a7461daeecb43d66079eac2c78216c1bc24c6e574d24a765cb		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1048576 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00008e00.pdf
ce9894fe19d6a5775b075d90833402eb9d0ac34538d8c80b9e4965447113255f		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x8E00 1016320 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00018e00.pdf
d5adc7d0e8b8e6e198564e39e4433957832bbb54d29e1dbb7a8a0ba8ccf773d9		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x18E00 950784 bytes

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