Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4c03ea4f25a4cd39…

MALICIOUS

PDF

82.6 KB
MD5: 9cae7fb767a21c37f2a5621ef6c899b9 SHA-1: 9918a347ee0640a75bdc656d0f777d6967fd3e44 SHA-256: 4c03ea4f25a4cd396d3d6475108c5adbdacd74b45608af18f111272f7a40b1a0
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. This exploit is designed to execute arbitrary code, as indicated by the critical heuristic firing for the exploit and the embedded script payload. The ClamAV detection further confirms its malicious nature as Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93.

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-93 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93
  • 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
cfc81f443eedd19aa6212849908f521c2ede47cdf506061aa3eeaf9e9e864ef7
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 83857 bytes