Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4972c09d1dd18ad9…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: 4d9241051873d5692d8a850e8e9a8f08 SHA-1: 53ae582b5efbc2e49d6d5c25972e38e9f7cf9180 SHA-256: 4972c09d1dd18ad9cf975d116a0f94ce337df59c4331e88cedc234a3a99a06da
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1204 User Execution

The sample is a PDF document 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 designed to be executed upon opening the document. This exploit likely leads to the download and execution of a second-stage payload, although the specific details of the payload are not available from the static analysis.

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
4ded20ffa6d3aebb9f448de0744106b66ce2157ec70f2c504a086d5b1dc2f7d3
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101437 bytes