Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9380d110fdb7c5b3…

MALICIOUS

PDF

78.7 KB
MD5: 6b8cc74d9f43e378e8907c03a2dc7697 SHA-1: 2aadd8352f48581fe465e033679528c8609356ae SHA-256: 9380d110fdb7c5b354b02811855ea01e4cc67a9d64f1ca156ee7dce5f2c97680
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file contains embedded XFA forms and scripts, triggering critical heuristics for CVE-2010-0188, an Adobe Reader exploit. The embedded script payload is likely responsible for executing the exploit, leading to the download and execution of a second-stage payload. The presence of XFA and embedded scripts indicates a malicious intent to leverage known vulnerabilities for initial compromise.

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
ada307f0adb9a33cd59e69f5d8487e09dfbb21ecddaf3206dbc1457998e8b71c
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 79817 bytes