Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a5b3f98700c58b01…

MALICIOUS

PDF

50.1 KB
MD5: e771089076e1bafaf580113e3396960a SHA-1: ca884ca1ad50ae9da4fbce33f000b178b8d1c02f SHA-256: a5b3f98700c58b01eef323f16fcada7b9fb07e547ee31d5ecd81b22709153600
198 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file contains an XFA form that triggers the CVE-2010-0188 exploit in Adobe Reader. This exploit is designed to execute arbitrary code, likely to download and run a second-stage payload. The ClamAV detection 'Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93' further confirms the malicious nature of the file, indicating it's a dropper for other malware.

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
69d2369f6f17cd33d8c80bf6264336f14480a31ebd553fa4a41fe68d4758a34f
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 50511 bytes