Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e7c72ec15c6ad6bd…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

193.6 KB First seen: 2022-10-17
MD5: 59c42eac4ee5b493665d2d682bed2f8c SHA-1: b5e3e4d61e6c924b817b2a31b109d1575067225c SHA-256: e7c72ec15c6ad6bdb672593510827e85c1b1036954cfa02b1e3d633c8210ead0
220 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1059.003 Windows Command Shell

The sample is an RTF document containing an OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882 through the Equation Editor. The document body contains a lure instructing the user to 'Enable editing', a common tactic to bypass security measures. The embedded object's ProgID, 'eQuAtION.3', is a strong indicator of this specific exploit.

Heuristics 6

  • Obfuscated Equation Editor ProgID + activation critical CVE related RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID from top-level \objdata hex after nested RTF junk groups are ignored, and the document also contains \objemb plus \objupdate activation. This is an obfuscated Equation Editor exploit surface associated with CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 families, but no exact malformed MTEF CVE primitive was recovered from this object.
  • Equation Editor activation — CVE-2017-11882 related high CVE related CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID and requests OLE activation with \objemb plus \objupdate. This reaches the legacy Equation Editor attack surface used by CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802 documents, but the malformed MTEF/native payload needed for stronger attribution was not recovered.
  • Automatically linked OLE object high RTF_OBJAUTLINK
    RTF contains \objautlink — an automatically linked OLE object surface that can be updated or activated when Word opens the document.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off0000119b.bin
3cb8cef2f8db6bbcff34e1785f8625c7fdffa4069da0eb0d6d3d158bd8380d3d		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x119B 1950 bytes

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