Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ae38d3a5ae7a5b22…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.9 KB
MD5: a436738d7e2b51a3723e173bf7aeaa7e SHA-1: e4e66bc33e67938256b8467a77d422ea459a3f3e SHA-256: ae38d3a5ae7a5b22c50ea80ec2d30a6eb8bfa759a941691ce1f7054068cd0e09
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader's handling of XFA forms and LibTIFF images. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, suggesting the PDF is designed to deliver a secondary payload. The exploit targets user execution by tricking the user into opening the malicious PDF.

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
b15e264f351609951425b2b28cdff979548fe5a2c2a789308eda3cf274e13f35		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101572 bytes

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