Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 2c7d80cb078d33f0…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 43a83de0ffc869e89fdf5aad08a19eab SHA-1: 95441b4db7a77fc96619037e6a47351c44c39fa0 SHA-256: 2c7d80cb078d33f04011a22e169ec93825d85d0b4ada8eed5a29f1e1722a5039
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File 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 LibTIFF XFA image processing. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to be executed by the user opening the document. The script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, although the exact functionality is obscured by the truncated script content. The embedded URLs are related to XFA schemas and do not appear to be directly malicious.

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
14a48a9cb8581938bc049db194575fb53f585448bdb20729bb61a61a6d0f4daa
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101232 bytes