Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 2a9274f1fbfaa7e0…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 9f31217e450399e3a90bb24b9f1ff7a1 SHA-1: 92b834013db65145c9d725152195f1cf05c13d33 SHA-256: 2a9274f1fbfaa7e09dc273e01a803c20e762dc5ca96ac3fe42ccbd0ae9416f5e
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a known vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. This exploit is designed to execute arbitrary code, and the presence of embedded script payloads within the XFA form strongly suggests the intention to download and execute a secondary stage. The embedded script is heavily obfuscated, making its exact function difficult to determine, but the exploit vector is clear.

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
8acc614aee4629eccc62463469c195c5c78e83ba844c9d553cebd20149748062		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101242 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.