Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 7c20ef9ab0ff6e76…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.7 KB
MD5: 269dd53951c0509fd2e8e56c64a1bb0c SHA-1: 2611cdb4cabeb1aafdb6017cb7e5bbd532d2c190 SHA-256: 7c20ef9ab0ff6e763973989f3eddc10fd957b009d93d8fb78eb97998b9b7b005
138 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

This PDF document exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, designed to be executed by the vulnerable reader. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, although the exact nature of the payload is not discernible from the provided evidence.

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
cb989eb956fd72c84efe29558eb8a34e9bf33f86cbbd528312d607cfd20e167b
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101343 bytes