Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4a8ac56be0ea779c…

MALICIOUS

PDF

59.9 KB
MD5: 3b58be0cfed8fe3efc4745f10703fe8f SHA-1: 6b3a8735dc2252a841cccfe0dd5daa0744aa5e8d SHA-256: 4a8ac56be0ea779c08d9b8c8ecc3f8ae9707512505687df8be9e6c1decfff1f9
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious File T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious Attachment T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter

The PDF file contains an embedded XFA form that triggers the CVE-2010-0188 exploit, targeting a vulnerability in Adobe Reader's LibTIFF processing. This exploit is designed to execute arbitrary code, and the presence of an embedded script payload further indicates malicious intent. The script likely downloads and executes a secondary payload, although its exact function is obscured by the exploit's nature. The embedded URLs are related to XFA schema definitions and do not appear to be directly malicious.

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
6fc22ccf7dec4714a395fc3e6ac250876e730dcf4faccf080e53ac4856c9e33a		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 60543 bytes

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