Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 974b12fe837858db…

MALICIOUS

PDF

86.8 KB
MD5: f212ab7221cd5dafef8dfb8c60c18de3 SHA-1: 2a753578d866a82f5674f4f40bfccbc11740482a SHA-256: 974b12fe837858dbd1baa55c72cfb99781b2467cf386685fc9f6053db4c2ae5e
198 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 known vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. ClamAV also detected this as Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload.

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.Exploit.Dropped-78 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78
  • 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
a28dd843291e106fd68930da9831444c2ec591a6bac1d3eeacb69284a632bc85		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 88143 bytes

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