Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 aedd8fe89b237eef…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: e81121c54bb7c387e0b4349869fcaaa0 SHA-1: abed9cc4c3a658a7aa95dd41e389a5b5edbffa38 SHA-256: aedd8fe89b237eefe63d7dce7bae174ba4c5736e6dd3165a9e62d6cf6c8fdca5
138 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The XFA form contains executable script, indicating an attempt to run malicious code upon opening the document. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, though the exact mechanism is obscured. The presence of embedded URLs suggests potential command and control or payload delivery infrastructure.

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
885e8bccfb5a7a43653b1d6848321d90ae03a6956a7ad58ba026729d5745410c		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101468 bytes

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