Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9ee982e321ce34b9…

MALICIOUS

PDF

50.6 KB
MD5: 5e7c0f484e809a1b863892d0168fb4ce SHA-1: 114b65dd51792db56c834d00e4414255962af6ff SHA-256: 9ee982e321ce34b99acbe4a452375a23a1854ffe81dea54481d148b32e2f9c0f
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.001 PowerShell T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to be exploited by malicious PDF documents. The ClamAV detection further confirms its malicious nature. The document body content is heavily obfuscated and does not provide clear user-facing text, but the exploit and embedded script point to a direct payload delivery mechanism.

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
cb7f9a7075c577804d9793ba17d313569e45ed15c5285e78d61928d30c87fab4
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC8 51016 bytes