Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 2b8a2830c5c75be8…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.9 KB
MD5: 6d06d5d33be4d281707fca051cdac329 SHA-1: d66b521e58de3657d196f4967f369ea88593e176 SHA-256: 2b8a2830c5c75be81bf9de518f715c414e269f6d4ab93c0ba86423a478306591
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 heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to execute arbitrary code. This type of exploit is commonly used to download and run further malicious content. No specific family could be identified, but the attack pattern is consistent with PDF-based 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
a6bd22741945c664120e3028b76d4b5157fbde581b78ef17d747e27779c32eb7
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101575 bytes