Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 57fc378c9e04e2e0…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: d4eec78886e99f2b283be934a9fa70f7 SHA-1: 51bb95d2f9b7923a11c8e8e6a1ff4fe066ca882f SHA-256: 57fc378c9e04e2e00272082cf232620641fcc2e03169cdc55a443738fb7b53d8
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell T1059.007 Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188 via XFA forms, a known vulnerability in Adobe Reader. The embedded script payload within the XFA form is indicative of an attempt to download and execute a secondary stage. While no specific family is identified, the exploit and scripting suggest a downloader or dropper functionality.

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
16f7427ab38c1d4d9485f98464ebe89637657205842e76bf93720f562eaae424
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101489 bytes