Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a01fe23da547c3bf…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.5 KB
MD5: 21fd59fc6d2695ba05c8c4b2b1fd7adb SHA-1: 2598c0a00a2fce2d50640f265d623d4903c3a276 SHA-256: a01fe23da547c3bf95f9c4698e39d62552d2c4a63b0ddbc2e38d5414bbea5394
138 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1204 User Execution

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a known vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF parsing. The critical heuristic firing confirms this exploit is present and likely decodes a payload from an XFA script. The embedded file and script payload heuristics further indicate malicious intent. The primary attack vector is likely a user opening a malicious PDF attachment, leading to the exploitation of this vulnerability.

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
5d2a6efc9368e79b5937e4edf83645a86ac6985ff6169ee96a94e77df6fde7b5		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101093 bytes

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