Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8ff6602e1335aacf…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: a737d7df9771492175c48821e86f7975 SHA-1: 6f71a6a267636297848d8009a49038fe841f9769 SHA-256: 8ff6602e1335aacfc34646f9827ce5964c5de5862246241729f95550e11f6e5f
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. This exploit likely leads to the execution of a malicious payload, as indicated by the 'PDF_EMBEDDED_SCRIPT_PAYLOAD' and 'PDF_XFA_SCRIPT' heuristics. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are part of the XFA structure. No scripts were directly extracted or reconstructed to determine specific actions, but the exploit itself is the primary attack vector.

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
2c764a139c5ea822b3b0c51dd31dd6cabc7b310d1e89febc549196eaff2daf02
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101429 bytes