Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b0821bba25cdb85a…

MALICIOUS

PDF

78.5 KB
MD5: 4dc06a075e6489a8e13234275e9bda32 SHA-1: 7a6e2af6940ca4b0055bd7c2c960084df6b212e0 SHA-256: b0821bba25cdb85a3f74894c1da7cfa655b5b40a76d50b77032851da53f6f979
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 related to XFA forms and LibTIFF parsing. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit documents designed to deliver a secondary payload. The document body is heavily obfuscated, preventing a clear understanding of its social engineering pretext, but the exploit itself is the primary attack vector.

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
21e7150147f1151d46ceec4a8db2af96408bdf3d5d52b72d3617b65414250847		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 79659 bytes

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