Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 971f5cb1844e3aba…

MALICIOUS

PDF

78.4 KB
MD5: 7dcec721b3302bf399f68b28b921f5a8 SHA-1: cc40658a9885a4d6540b713213bf4aea58cc5393 SHA-256: 971f5cb1844e3abaee10fec5833c159ca3b1020561148341e2e0806bb6a4128d
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. This exploit allows for the execution of arbitrary code, indicated by the critical heuristic firing. The embedded script payload and XFA script further support this, suggesting the PDF is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload. The ClamAV detection confirms its malicious nature.

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.Malware.Agent-9783732-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Malware.Agent-9783732-0
  • 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
9ae0f83e3f6f6c2255f638fc8423813dec9fe9b656f182c51f9aed6735ddd0cc		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 79537 bytes

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