Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 afb160fc87960ef4…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 4fdaf88c7992726f4aaefa12ce7463a2 SHA-1: 90795978c7b8f1e71a518bd4bd78eefc75c037a2 SHA-256: afb160fc87960ef494b37cec45004101c03bc5ecc587c2918c9133d6f23fe371
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. This exploit allows for arbitrary code execution. No scripts were extracted, but the embedded file and XFA structure indicate a malicious payload delivery mechanism. The embedded URLs are likely related to the XFA template or data, but their reputation is unknown or benign.

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
2e5bde0ec9dfc5fef1b2e3bb271b9b401598709861f8ad812e59c5bc1f524b87
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101242 bytes