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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e68ea041c96b370e…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.09 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-04
MD5: 8cc4e73f5ceb73680f5f59b09997d8a3 SHA-1: 263fb5f059b972f779b4f5d14fb8e674a5b6c799 SHA-256: e68ea041c96b370e4d00b77da341aef26e7e25403198f5a49e9f9e310f66dc90
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.002 Malicious Link: Malicious File T1566 Phishing T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter T1059.005 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object contains a secondary embedded PDF which exhibits suspicious static findings, indicating a multi-stage attack. No VBA macros were found to be executable, but the presence of the Equation Editor exploit and the embedded PDF strongly suggests a malicious payload delivery mechanism.

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
4314a582758c3d0598a4612f10bcd3f10eee17763bbf6b9410a8e4da02f8a28d		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD000CDC3A/oLE10naTIve 1399 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_off00069200.pdf
d9eb9d8b5fda2aa7b38838467d33f265d9864addab7db430e97e3216ed5794bf		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x69200 716288 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
2807602d80408c35704663d73e5b9a684ba2b07f05bb6b1b273cb6151b58c0eb		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1142784 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
7c857ba35812ca6824dab4eba88973c2cfacaac17cf48e81cff7c990b7776028		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1121792 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off0000e200.pdf
fb43b2181b63b690e3e3b6b1fc8ab45afe72232b3df8a599ed3cf47d5e06722c		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0xE200 1089024 bytes

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