Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 20e74846d07c7851…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.9 KB
MD5: 9865095b6b2f180816bc651b547e9c2a SHA-1: 5ab5beef5a75b441d5dae493da5007affed988ff SHA-256: 20e74846d07c78519bf7319c588eea0a1acae41ddfc644204f0a43473f6f8829
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The PDF contains an embedded script payload within an XFA form, indicating an attempt to execute arbitrary code upon opening. The embedded script is likely responsible for downloading and executing a second-stage payload, though its exact functionality is obscured. The presence of XFA and the specific CVE exploit strongly suggest a malicious intent to compromise the user's system.

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
6187499af7efc0c6b3ee9b778bfd083c3c2d9d069c9e0c395981c4d6f2d7c8b8
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101530 bytes