Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 972590c2fd37ed1e…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: a3592bfee892747903adcd7a398a3432 SHA-1: e0f6a0bd7e2fd71da1215418064d966f5ab44b3a SHA-256: 972590c2fd37ed1ed9ab30e40d3c2fc8f89409556260ab9a732f1997967fc9ad
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are associated with the XFA structure. The script likely attempts to download and execute a second-stage payload.

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
c466f4c418f78bcf9abb7cc7ad8a37af065f8cd00abc016c05a86f9ea5e20568
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101284 bytes