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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e81fb40571112cf6…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.13 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-10-24
MD5: 10385173a9abdd115212bb2a1bc05947 SHA-1: ac6ba758b92121bd380940762a36552d2e86c81b SHA-256: e81fb40571112cf6f6365618b2231576a60adbac35ee07644ac0f32bec497429
172 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1559.002 Component Object Model Hijacking

The sample is an Excel file containing a malicious Equation Editor OLE object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This object is designed to drop a secondary embedded PDF, which itself contains suspicious static findings. The VBA macros are empty, indicating the exploit is directly 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://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/

Extracted artifacts 6

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
eb77e29520d3fcbbdb4c5ea5a8eebcfd8c9d8fdd41111fd81ccc033fa9839e64		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD002CFD76/oLE10NATIVE 1536 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00049c00.pdf
fec44189366559b38f94ce691aa8f9eed79e7444b5f5c82177ae03feb7f2c220		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x49C00 884224 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00001000.pdf
8ce94603b7daecbdea1bb4c2112d3339442c5f2265786b75beced383fd97b0ba		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1000 1182208 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00006200.pdf
3f94147a06ea46d34d9e8b8048557de0952ba52426f7c002407641b865d783fc		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x6200 1161216 bytes
polyglot_child_pdf_off00009600.pdf
0a17045fa5024bd70bc648b31cef2da19bcddab561f37bec145e2bcbc4d2cbef		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x9600 1147904 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.