Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 28f0d9bea195bae6…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.5 KB
MD5: 538020b8633ba36c08a59dd6f5767d1d SHA-1: ebc6548e859ee747c99e640e6590aa72024ea6cf SHA-256: 28f0d9bea195bae6e346b9a46b027f4d988350837d92e94739feaca211acc78d
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

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, indicating an attempt to execute malicious code upon opening. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, though its exact functionality is obscured. The presence of XFA and the specific CVE points to a targeted exploit delivery.

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
5ba62d28c709a4ddf7aeebf811995b14702259ab6e301c9654f5a2707f9f8082
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101090 bytes