Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8c297ef0810b65cb…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.7 KB
MD5: e0551ba92aa3f51ef2cf095ec994b20a SHA-1: 2b3abb1c1482c65fb98de07c8d8a6ee680d7cd7a SHA-256: 8c297ef0810b65cbc3a022d7e2d1ee4497771cb46a8c429ef004333da43e9808
138 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 related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. The PDF contains embedded scripts and an embedded file, indicating it's designed to deliver a malicious payload. The embedded script likely attempts to download and execute a second-stage payload, though the exact script content is truncated. The presence of XFA forms and embedded scripts points to a common PDF-based exploit delivery method.

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
709044618d3b081699df8eb18b7aab5810cfdaf9f539ab37b338788cc41544d1
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101383 bytes