Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a634e8ea11028430…

MALICIOUS

PDF

4.6 KB Authoring application: rqb
MD5: 0cc4e351f9587395d81e43cfb959faf3 SHA-1: aa7903c5e5b1f1f07c1433178a86bdd5984655df SHA-256: a634e8ea11028430800defec6a131a353836f9cde7d2857cdd6b228fd18e6542
132 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. This exploit allows for the execution of arbitrary code. An embedded JavaScript payload was also detected, likely contributing to the malicious functionality by downloading and executing a second-stage payload.

Machine Learning

  • Nyx PDF Classifier malicious score 1.0000

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.
  • 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
  • Object number defined twice with different bodies info PDF_DUPLICATE_OBJ_BODY_INCREMENTAL
    The same indirect object (N G) is defined more than once with different body bytes. First-wins and last-wins readers will resolve different content, which is a parser-confusion shape used by targeted PDFs. Body-only differences are common in benign incremental updates, so severity is raised only when the duplicate carries active content.
  • PDF differential parser failed info PDF_DIFFERENTIAL_PARSE_FAILED
    The cross-check parser (pdfminer.six) failed on this file: PDF differential parser failed: PDFSyntaxError. Static heuristics still ran and any of their findings above are valid; only the differential cross-check signal is missing.
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
stream_001_off000002b0.js
95532c3790fb00341f679608a6a8c34e45c82b397d7cb094f694d6704829cabb
decompressed-pdf-stream PDF FlateDecoded stream at offset 0x2B0 38523 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 3 long base64-like blob(s).