Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8ea556e0ffe82815…

MALICIOUS

PDF

83.0 KB
MD5: 3b2f8a7afe02b26f1a802279cfadd6a3 SHA-1: 9bb1ec69d7dd7984d9382e12eae4081f2aa0e04f SHA-256: 8ea556e0ffe828152d03fd928bee762cbe13bdc9095a4e2394677f6f9d19a494
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The critical heuristic firings indicate that the PDF contains an embedded script payload designed to be executed by an exploited XFA form. This exploit likely leads to the download and execution of a second-stage payload, as suggested by the ClamAV detection name 'Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93'.

Heuristics 7

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93
  • 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
c9c6313b7fe229bfcd33fdc740bbefe443a49c516ddc38a3289af99eff4f58c5
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 84207 bytes