Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ad3df178f55474c2…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.9 KB
MD5: a904396c49fa72390b2397b803179341 SHA-1: de8ffe0e656d5e46bcb5be4800c69f535de74839 SHA-256: ad3df178f55474c281813e9b84955ebc251dbfc1116fdd9819711cde29499266
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader's LibTIFF component, to achieve code execution. The presence of XFA forms and embedded script payloads further indicates malicious intent. The script appears to be designed to download and execute a second-stage payload, though its exact functionality is obscured.

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
4f54566acb1fabd3e31104a6ec246e80e70bfab534b60d99fa0e942bdb1b8e84
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101562 bytes