Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 2554faecc29dcc7b…

MALICIOUS

PDF

79.1 KB
MD5: 8ff3b5d6771972546c35b7c6294fa068 SHA-1: 73941209c6473ad4b9274b5e09dd58a9e07a7fd9 SHA-256: 2554faecc29dcc7bb0e3d522710bc810ab737e737ead63f5cc8b28d5f51aed8d
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious PDF T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The critical heuristic firing indicates that the PDF contains a decoded XFA payload designed to execute arbitrary code. The presence of embedded scripts further supports the malicious intent, likely to download and execute a second-stage payload. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are part of the XFA structure.

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
740da5f8155ada2c61d9e58de863c07b2634e84fcae93236158e47ce73922a87		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 80249 bytes

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