Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a5a327788041bdf6…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.5 KB
MD5: 6a4c56bba02b4343cb9613ea36d9bf6d SHA-1: 298c49ba353de94e3cb24a620f307be59d1829a4 SHA-256: a5a327788041bdf6218c8c9b6adf4d6bad2520745be73adbe58dfb05dadba67c
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The critical heuristic firing indicates that the XFA payload was decoded from a raw stream, and a high-confidence heuristic confirms that the XFA form contains executable script. This script is likely responsible for downloading and executing a second-stage payload, although the specific script content is truncated and obfuscated. The embedded URLs are related to XFA specifications and do not appear malicious.

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
f00ac7b397999434927b8a7a157066b8f45487def22dff0cd111813d403ace09		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101150 bytes

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