Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 3a4252cbc635f178…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: a9a829ceb189f85359d66d388362734f SHA-1: 3a008a0e61b8a0e5012f8a016b72954bdeb0b755 SHA-256: 3a4252cbc635f178afa218446943b6486f4d28735ea549d6451d587ad8ffe75d
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.001 PowerShell

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF. The embedded script payload within the XFA form is indicative of an attempt to download and execute a secondary malicious payload. While the specific family is not identifiable, the exploit and embedded script strongly suggest a malicious downloader. No URLs were confirmed as malicious, but they are included as potential indicators.

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
aa800a6e89fc8160f2ccba95d63847d6dead06d7649d128015deb0e7be0eb163
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101486 bytes