Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a9b4298fe0d567d4…

MALICIOUS

PDF

100.0 KB
MD5: 836ca3c5e8bb3ed64686163c2e4c5dce SHA-1: 13d408fb266c84e8648ea5bbc9cd6c2dc30aa914 SHA-256: a9b4298fe0d567d4bb2635f1e3bd58ad62f85480b56b8b43738c8e3220a81158
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious Attachment T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The PDF file contains embedded XFA forms and scripts, triggering heuristics for CVE-2010-0188, an Adobe Reader vulnerability. The embedded script payload is likely responsible for executing arbitrary code, potentially downloading a second-stage payload. The presence of XFA forms and embedded scripts indicates a malicious document designed to exploit known vulnerabilities in PDF readers.

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
6b6e1052217868a857216449a2d5c1e47ad26db6d8b68911426145a3c4a480b0		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101623 bytes

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