Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ac2df09e1e7de756…

MALICIOUS

PDF

79.0 KB
MD5: 91a1ff898a5131a928bb4be9b8e146c5 SHA-1: 1e70ea9a8e6606db97a27af6fc42146d920a9307 SHA-256: ac2df09e1e7de7562788648a0f47d0ba01c313b0a31e7e34d2195af0574e966c
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The embedded script payload within the XFA form is likely responsible for executing arbitrary code, leading to the malicious verdict. The embedded URLs are associated with XFA and Adobe, but their reputation is unknown or benign, suggesting they are not directly malicious IOCs.

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
6d9239059e7276ff604464a03cb0ea1167d0eff5b07fbeb70fbfdcc67f240947
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 80141 bytes