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When I’m asked to perform a quick check of an online PDF document, that I expect to be benign, I will just point my PDF tools to the online document. When you provide an URL argument to pdf-parser, it will download the document and perform the analysis (without writing it to disk).
Quickpost info
MD5 007de2c71861a3e1e6d70f7fe8f4ce9b is a malicious document: a spreadsheet with Excel 4.0 macros.
Excel 4.0 macros predate VBA macros: they are composed of functions placed inside cells of a macro sheet.
These macros are not stored in dedicated VBA streams, but as BIFF records in the Workbook stream.
Spreadsheets with Excel 4.0 macros can be analyzed with oledump.py and plugin plugin_biff.py.
Option -x of plugin_biff will select all BIFF records relevant for the analysis of Excel 4.0 macros:
In this output, we have all the BIFF records necessary to 1) determine that this is a malicious document and 2) report what this maldoc does.
The first BIFF record, BOUNDSHEET, tells us that the spreadsheet contains a Excel 4.0 macro sheet that is hidden.
The third BIFF LABEL record tells us that there is a cell with name Auto_Open: the macros will execute when the spreadsheet is opened.
And then we have BIFF FORMULA records that tell us that something is CONCATENATEd and EXECuted.
The BIFF STRING record provides us with the exact command (msiexec …) that will be executed.
The latest version of plugin_biff contains much larger lists of tokens and functions used in formula expressions. Of course, it’s still possible that tokens and/or functions are used unknown by my plugin. This is now clearly indicated in the output:
*UNKNOWN FUNCTION* is reported when a function number is unknown. The function number is always reported. Here, for the sake of this example, a crippled version of plugin_biff reports functions with number 0x0037 and 0x0150. In the released version of plugin_biff, functions 0x0037 and 0x0150 are identified as RETURN and CONCATENATE respectively.
*INCOMPLETE FORMULA PARSING* is reported when a formula expression can not be fully parsed. Left of the warning *INCOMPLETE FORMULA PARSING*, the partially parsed expression can be found, and right of the warning, the remaining, unparsed expression is reported as a Python string. If the remainder contains bytes that could be potentially dangerous functions like EXEC, then this is reported too.
The complete analysis of the maldoc is explained in this video:
This version comes with a major update of the BIFF plugin (for Excel files). New features for plugin_biff.py will be discussed in detail in next blog post.
And there are 2 minor changes to oledump itself.
A warning is displayed when an Office file format without macro-support is selected, like .docx files:
In prior versions, no output was produced at all when files like .docx files were processed.
And there’s a bug fix when selecting non-existing streams:
oledump_V0_0_42.zip (https)
MD5: C5CCF18F9F10CB6916CC74C002C78EDE
SHA256: 14A1FDA4AB57B09729AEB2697818782FAE498369A760FEC8AEE5CFB0A0E9D126