Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a3466caaad65cdbc…

MALICIOUS

PDF

100.0 KB
MD5: f910bb020bd7baae4e2126bb1c85ff6b SHA-1: cdd28bff2e7b50f3b55da5aefaa1da28a03cec08 SHA-256: a3466caaad65cdbc3ce397b3da8cd2b3da4813f626dd6b135692b4eade56a3af
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

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, designed to be executed by the user opening the document. This suggests a delivery mechanism for a secondary exploit or malware. No specific family could be identified, but the exploit vector is clear.

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
b782f27fe4cfcfe53f3a0f806e6aad9969ef808c4ca481a9abc10423011b930e
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101684 bytes