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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 fdbc2a5c02d7f12b…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.05 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-11-21
MD5: ff4d762022384dd819bf5fbbedf95dd1 SHA-1: 0a665ced13aa979362a2591ba3d772644c2c65ab SHA-256: fdbc2a5c02d7f12bc3066059492d503c92f5ccb9f847527b73f906be11f72f1e
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate this object exploits CVE-2017-11882, a known vulnerability in Microsoft Equation Editor. The VBA macros are present but appear to contain no executable statements, suggesting the primary malicious functionality resides within the OLE object. The SHA256 hash is included as an IOC.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
ed8da65f0f0a4cc2a905cfcf1ae916bf05ced375ebeefae9a837c8bf84ad6699		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 3618 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
aa65f2483e5205e3964f30a936625497959514770913668e47fe87cad1b7ddf0		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD01D7BDF1/oLE10nATive 2208 bytes

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