Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 23cfb2c925494ffc…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.7 KB
MD5: ecdb9fa3506dcf8d60ee986c547e6f4d SHA-1: f1ff4f1a1b1fe4632446abdfc92488657b6b4710 SHA-256: 23cfb2c925494ffc79636d6addb92912b20988ad90580dcac35369f488277424
138 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, suggesting the document is designed to deliver and execute malicious code upon opening in a vulnerable reader. No specific malware family could be identified, but the attack pattern is consistent with exploit-laden documents.

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/ In PDF document text
    • http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-template/2.5/In PDF document text
    • http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-data/1.0/In PDF document text

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
embedded_file_obj0008.bin
d32c6e0d3c631dbf0731b624d0d8d7b36b05f2057b465d849e920030e051c8a7
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101377 bytes