Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9cd83208b1063ce1…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: d1e1ad139a3f026044638dcbc02f3292 SHA-1: 0ea5edda38f54e68d5cd05b39fd958e885d434d6 SHA-256: 9cd83208b1063ce1c95558d67993e0f3f2dd13bb70c2a24a4f1066ccd1608a19
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.001 Malicious Link: Malicious Link T1204.002 Malicious Link: Malicious File T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter T1059.007 Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to be executed by a vulnerable version of Adobe Reader. This exploit likely leads to the download and execution of a secondary malicious 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
37767fea7230c11f0451cdd9f10363f6a9e008870dde6eaafbd42fb1f1b3cf64
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101497 bytes