Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9ad217b9eee89b12…

MALICIOUS

PDF

50.1 KB
MD5: a26a697f686af8d87836a5091030d532 SHA-1: 68b20a06c56e7fac071253614aa3100625d8739e SHA-256: 9ad217b9eee89b12d1aa182d1210967cb2d8334cae9a196eb8909e8c75eb655d
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious File T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious Attachment T1566 Phishing T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The ClamAV detection further confirms its malicious nature. The embedded file and script suggest the document is designed to download and execute 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-93 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93
  • 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
7f3281941bc2c57840de96134a34043cec2dd91730f1d17b2489fa0046f11f09
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 50535 bytes