Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 88ec453dce16253d…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: bb25bd4448be48f0046a174eafcb00e9 SHA-1: 5efe3c6242e930a1967b168674673667f3d94c1d SHA-256: 88ec453dce16253dd26f030e18876d2769f229c4adbafd8796928862cb073032
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader's handling of LibTIFF XFA images. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit-laden documents. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are associated with the XFA structure. The primary attack vector is the exploitation of this known vulnerability to achieve arbitrary code execution.

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
1c04357ff2ff4cb5f5abea0a6b050e2cb5c6aceff5a8cadd6e4a8a71c83f200e		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101472 bytes

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