Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 941b79ec262b21f6…

MALICIOUS

PDF

78.7 KB
MD5: 151d3f702f20abfdb18ea9c37901bfe2 SHA-1: 2ab40a28db3672057295381f93d61e5544cfded1 SHA-256: 941b79ec262b21f66badb6798ef2e0e63094b4c435c71b0996699acd09f42fe4
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to be executed by the vulnerable reader. The embedded URLs are related to XFA schemas and Adobe, but their reputation is unknown or benign, suggesting they are not directly involved in payload delivery. The script itself appears obfuscated and truncated, making it difficult to determine its exact function beyond exploiting the CVE.

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
415196208398a087cfe7d44a89b6e8471a8212ca7e889fdd0cef83c840e136c6		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 79808 bytes

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