Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 41deb22835fd3c81…

MALICIOUS

PDF

78.8 KB
MD5: 3ee28f3e5399bca78fe55cc1e54b087e SHA-1: 738f6a7ce2ffdc4396e97432841d0e2a6d6aa58b SHA-256: 41deb22835fd3c81ea9c838296c4960f12df88c1e3e4006f7a78d808e9411b31
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 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 likely used to execute arbitrary code. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are part of the XFA structure.

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
3654f53d9638e6053aeb22faf3b9439f5fc290aa41b56bd0ee288fc7a318e6d6
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 79995 bytes