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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e2740c0a10117866…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

99.9 KB First seen: 2022-09-07
MD5: 1cd1986db77c002b623d039f85024518 SHA-1: 94b88c6ca4d566726f34e7b8a85433c31efe1bfa SHA-256: e2740c0a10117866f08cbee1f6e6a5bcdb6859d72de7b3b6deff1a95c6880673
220 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1559.001 Component Object Model Hijacking

The file is an encrypted Office document containing an Equation Editor OLE object. High-severity heuristics indicate exploitation of CVE-2018-0798 via anomalous Equation Editor native stream, suggesting it acts as an exploit carrier. The document's encrypted nature and the presence of an OLE object within the 'oleObject1.bin' stream are strong indicators of a malicious exploit delivery mechanism.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • 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.