Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9798b414e9068c12…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: d12b36020b80284ff0fccaab847c7650 SHA-1: a0bb5690fb427ada6caffa6b7fd80671a22f5387 SHA-256: 9798b414e9068c12f656192899cb096c762a1521dee5de0f52f8d25afc56e210
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious PDF T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell T1566.002 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate that the XFA form contains executable script, which is likely used to download and execute a secondary payload. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are associated with XFA templates and could be part of the exploit chain.

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
e706dbfa244384aba3a4c63260e28d3a7536445c955b3ef8a182a277c8f0d6d5
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101192 bytes