Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ac8fee49066a3455…

MALICIOUS

PDF

76.0 KB
MD5: f0c242c4d9ba6444a021369edbd9a870 SHA-1: 3543ce51f03071266ec02f400321b251fb101710 SHA-256: ac8fee49066a3455d5d43aee9cef499c475737a798c00504ba301abf26b12f39
198 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to be executed by the vulnerable reader. This exploit likely leads to the download and execution of a secondary payload, as suggested by the ClamAV detection name 'Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78'.

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-78 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78
  • 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
a6601e5429b454a1dc705b1c0625b20853ffdc024ee1e5796a2b7fd0c45a0e8f
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 77062 bytes