Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9cb9c0e750ab0b04…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.4 KB
MD5: 6bf5cfb6999d98a4e4943dd4ee65296b SHA-1: 16bb8c1ba3698a6b5e4443a588b7fcedfcdb5f79 SHA-256: 9cb9c0e750ab0b04d268964540a5950cdfe69e73c65736c7547b1e09a24102b6
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The critical heuristic indicates that the decoded XFA payload was matched, suggesting the exploit is designed to execute arbitrary code. The presence of embedded script payloads and XFA forms with executable scripts further supports this. The likely intent is to download and execute a secondary payload, although the specific script content is too obfuscated to determine the exact mechanism.

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
64b7601cea90ff7c6e1380e1f0cef225cc28f3b3d8e547746c4f5af5f7a21966		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101038 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.