Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 abb89015c85ad223…

MALICIOUS

PDF

50.8 KB
MD5: 4507dd8a1542ebcbaa3ebcade4752976 SHA-1: 0f3d24271bd9cc4fe4fca20da3f8e3ddf1b0f40e SHA-256: abb89015c85ad223badf4f11092e63e72849c93e3f139291747bc0a5f0a3bf93
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that leverages the CVE-2010-0188 vulnerability in Adobe Reader. This is indicated by the critical heuristic firings for 'CVE_2010_0188' and 'PDF_XFA_SCRIPT'. The ClamAV detection 'Pdf.Exploit.Agent-6136306-0' further confirms its malicious nature. The embedded script payload suggests the PDF is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload.

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.Agent-6136306-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Agent-6136306-0
  • 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
4588157beb208e87601433747c6299c13799ec7dc8c52c481f6f8dd672ab5023
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC8 51273 bytes