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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 f22c58da5f1fa541…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

93.9 KB First seen: 2022-06-15
MD5: 32dda6e630feeed2b13093a3de97cf5a SHA-1: 40be4968972da44cd694dcdecb295e904562e2b2 SHA-256: f22c58da5f1fa5414ffbe4d718f543aa2a52c46cbe0abd77768079b29a878d95
220 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.001 Malicious Link: Malicious Link T1559 Component Object Model Hijacking T1559.001 Component Object Model Hijacking: Component Object Model Hijacking T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The file is an encrypted Office document containing an Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate this object is anomalous and exploits CVE-2018-0798, a vulnerability in Microsoft Equation Editor. This suggests the document is designed to leverage the Equation Editor vulnerability to execute malicious code, likely as a delivery mechanism for further stages of an attack. No document body or scripts were extractable due to encryption.

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.