How Malformed RTF Defeats Security Engines

This post is authored by Paul Rascagneres with contributions from Alex McDonnell

Executive Summary

Talos has discovered a new spam campaign used to infect targets with the well known Loki Bot stealer. The infection vector is an RTF document abusing an old exploit (CVE-2012-1856), however the most interesting part is the effort put into the generation of the RTF. The document contains several malformations designed to defeat security engines and parsers. The attacker has gone out of their way to attempt to evade content inspection devices like AV or network security devices. According to VirusTotal, the initial detection rate of a malicious RTF document recovered from a recent spam campaign is only 3 out of 45 available engines.