Malicious RTF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ffbad73a1985b3c2…

MALICIOUS

RTF

1.87 MB First seen: 2023-09-05
MD5: 91ddaf1628da8f0c1d532cd217a7f26d SHA-1: 7b067d8c1949ae7320f3e6ed48c478ed2b2b6bb6 SHA-256: ffbad73a1985b3c26c98579c62c74496e9f76a083e7dc4d2103258f03fddaed5
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File

The RTF document contains an OLE object that leverages the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability in Microsoft Equation Editor. This vulnerability is known to be used for delivering arbitrary payloads, and the presence of a decoded PE file within the OLE object strongly suggests it's a downloader or initial execution stage.

Heuristics 7

  • Equation Editor OLE1 native payload — CVE-2017-11882 related critical CVE related CVE_2017_11882_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an OLE1 Equation.3 embedded object whose native data is large and payload-like, and \objupdate requests automatic activation. This is the delivery shape used by Equation Editor RCE documents such as CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802, but the malformed MTEF record needed for exact attribution was not recovered.
  • Decoded Equation Editor payload + PE critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF decodes to an Equation Editor ProgID adjacent to OLE activation and the same decoded object stream contains embedded PE bytes. This matches the Equation Editor exploit surface used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 documents, while requiring payload evidence to avoid flagging benign Equation references.
  • 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.
  • Large hex data blocks in OLE object high RTF_EXCESSIVE_HEX
    RTF contains ~1962KB of hex-encoded data inside \objdata sections — may hide a payload
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00000092.bin
6b59281048c02f09ec348c9f0816eb6e17b2ddb286e0acb603e7a9804a5ea247
rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x92 981346 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact entropy is 7.99, consistent with packed or encrypted content.