Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 52072a8dc98f224a…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: 409ac9eff87fd53d4c43663ebb5f9795 SHA-1: 8cc9fbd54fa957dee14fcf00e432ecdb57ecfae7 SHA-256: 52072a8dc98f224a9820dd19e6e74f4b4a9f5f7b18b5035ef6c851fa1fcae4b4
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, although the specific script content was truncated and obfuscated.

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
d9ba2b5ccd7e1149ec39b2e6ef50962229d282e5825825e3d6f7d24587a04362		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101417 bytes

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