Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ae2730b75c59f0e7…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 8ae09a2430519930477d388650489923 SHA-1: df03d160f25db580a34956c0791866bdd1c05cf4 SHA-256: ae2730b75c59f0e78ab72e4d6599f78476e110e53c618fb709179241f9849594
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious PDF T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, suggesting the PDF is designed to deliver and execute malicious code. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are associated with the XFA structure. The script's purpose is likely to download and execute a second-stage payload, leading to a compromise.

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
826cff7a3ebbb444d64f758bbeb56195880dd81dcf59f3ea1e4dc21d7bc6387c
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101193 bytes