Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9f9ac647b954ce85…

MALICIOUS

PDF

80.1 KB
MD5: 48bbc8a201debf962f40c3b0a7f37366 SHA-1: 8e9df44a2e194806d9bf4c816f20bce8bbc2f3c7 SHA-256: 9f9ac647b954ce85bcf639dbd6039854120bfaeff630481e785e573c1c15e585
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The critical heuristic indicates that the XFA payload was decoded from a raw stream, and a high heuristic confirms the presence of executable script within the XFA form. This script is likely responsible for downloading and executing a second-stage payload, although the exact nature of the payload could not be determined from the provided evidence. The embedded URLs are related to XFA schema definitions and do not appear to be malicious themselves.

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
f4da69a46df0161a74a934de80cce1f0f3981331caadc9aa323b40c3346e98f2		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 81250 bytes

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