Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 483017cfa8e7aedf…

MALICIOUS

PDF

50.6 KB
MD5: 18f6a90bb5b66aa8051ca1fe00001b0a SHA-1: 137851a52d87ccd3dd7aeb43d50a450cc73e36e4 SHA-256: 483017cfa8e7aedf9f793514bbb6fe873c942ed223a70dc0a4eb361a955ca366
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that leverages the CVE-2010-0188 exploit targeting Adobe Reader's XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within a PDF stream, designed to execute an exploit. This exploit likely leads to the download and execution of a secondary malicious payload, as suggested by the ClamAV detection name 'Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78'. The document body content is heavily obfuscated and does not provide clear user-facing text, but the technical indicators strongly point to an exploit delivery mechanism.

Heuristics 7

  • 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-78 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78
  • 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
c207750b09b6098893be1770856034279197417f65b93ce030549c369b6be58e		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC8 51022 bytes

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