Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a008b00a2d7a34cb…

MALICIOUS

PDF

82.0 KB
MD5: 8842898999cc23f879664960b912c20f SHA-1: 9837e81b3c1140f5e3309bf422f8a5ad6bb5827e SHA-256: a008b00a2d7a34cbd72d6accc496e333a2071b686e95c6be87adea74bcd58f04
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a known vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The embedded file and ClamAV detection further confirm its malicious nature. The script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, although the exact mechanism is obscured.

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
13aba13262134670edb3aaa2cad0f57be8559bdfdfad0a654620a000f7fbbae1
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 83243 bytes