Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 437b00203ae55750…

MALICIOUS

PDF

70.0 KB
MD5: 22fe02f4e038208419907548bdf9a942 SHA-1: a40d3f6171408252a28a689b998c797f97d61532 SHA-256: 437b00203ae557504b92abef185cb43cf710c8a14d3645b640f160a706b26d6d
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

This PDF document exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF processing. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The ClamAV detection and the embedded artifact further confirm its malicious nature. The document body is heavily obfuscated and truncated, preventing a clear understanding of its social engineering pretext, but the exploit itself is the primary attack vector.

Heuristics 9

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93
  • eval() call high PDF_EVAL
    eval() found — commonly used for obfuscated exploit execution
  • 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
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.
  • 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
0d8e6ea86f357b6e10f5e1b12f3cee069f7966d54a02060bd4ee214141aedd80
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 70909 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 1 eval/decoder/string-building token(s).