Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4ab3ef7a014cb5ac…

MALICIOUS

PDF

5.3 KB
MD5: 87514da8fa98a7b19d9a9f2830058302 SHA-1: fa3c5b7cf6ca72537f91957ca25cdcd558602dbc SHA-256: 4ab3ef7a014cb5acea2f45a057561fb163f8a01568cdaa828760b7162392cc1b
218 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

The PDF file contains a critical heuristic firing for CVE-2010-0188, indicating an exploit targeting Adobe Reader's LibTIFF component. This exploit is designed to achieve code execution. An embedded script payload was also detected, further supporting the malicious intent of executing arbitrary code. The extracted artifact, 'embedded_file_obj0008.bin', is likely the secondary payload.

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.
  • ClamAV: Pdf.Exploit.CVE_2010_0188-10 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.CVE_2010_0188-10
  • ClamAV detection on extracted artifact critical EXTRACTED_FILE_CLAMAV
    ClamAV flagged at least one file extracted from inside this sample. Even when the wrapping document carries no AV detection of its own, a hit on the carved artifact is a strong indicator the sample is a delivery vehicle.
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
embedded_file_obj0008.bin
c3c8db4a981fa14708fc4c35c81074732598f4a412c6a5ebc38615c79e1c21ef
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0x408 30781 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: Pdf.Exploit.CVE_2010_0188-10
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 1 long base64-like blob(s).