Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 1bffa156953d3b84…

MALICIOUS

PDF

79.1 KB
MD5: 39f8a27b26d208f39da37eb04816d94d SHA-1: 1607ebc813dc9bcb078c2257ee7d5a5c696d9224 SHA-256: 1bffa156953d3b844520f96b9c81e93daa18174705e014dbb1b564ec9bc8a131
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious Attachment T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1204 User Execution T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The critical heuristic indicates that the XFA payload was decoded from a raw stream, and a high-confidence heuristic confirms that the XFA form contains executable script. This script is likely responsible for downloading and executing a second-stage payload, a common technique for initial access.

Heuristics 6

  • Adobe Reader LibTIFF XFA image exploit — CVE-2010-0188 critical CVE likely CVE_2010_0188
    PDF contains the CVE-2010-0188 exploit template: XFA JavaScript heap-spray setup, a generated TIFF image payload, and assignment of that TIFF data to an XFA image field rawValue to trigger Adobe Reader's LibTIFF parser.
  • XFA form contains executable script high CVE related PDF_XFA_SCRIPT
    PDF embeds an XFA form whose dataset contains a <script> or <xfa:script> block — XFA scripting has been the exploit primitive for several Adobe Reader RCEs (CVE-2010-0188 family, CVE-2018-4901, and others). Plain XFA without scripts is far less risky.
  • Embedded script payload in PDF stream medium PDF_EMBEDDED_SCRIPT_PAYLOAD
    PDF stream bytes contain an HTML/XFA <script> tag without accompanying Windows shell-execution primitives — common in accessible XFA forms but worth surfacing for analyst review.
  • Embedded file low PDF_EMBEDDED
    PDF embeds a file attachment — could carry an executable or another weaponised document as a nested payload
  • XFA form low PDF_XFA
    PDF uses XML Forms Architecture — can contain script logic
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL http://ns.adobe.com/xdp/
    • http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-template/2.5/
    • http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-data/1.0/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
embedded_file_obj0008.bin
2fbcdcb2a6154e566d8374ff0a02b7380a38196be15058a5c0ff5f0ee7ecd1d3
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 80237 bytes