Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8b2a5a5cad542dcc…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 97e6ad6865951e965265ace804f457a1 SHA-1: b77e8a09f23b37b2c1f204fa528a69eb2ede7660 SHA-256: 8b2a5a5cad542dccdc68ae836881897c9e5314c84157c031cae6a806e1f2829d
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The critical heuristic indicates a direct match for this exploit. The PDF contains embedded scripts and an embedded file, suggesting it's designed to download and execute a secondary payload. The embedded URLs are not directly malicious but are part of the XFA structure.

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
d5e13561b0439ce9dc67783d3cca0d37f1cb38c38740ffb1db52edaece3ffa09
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101292 bytes