Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b1ac86ef39ea16c2…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 37e4496acd5c45e3e181355ca2f22eba SHA-1: 1beefc8dac337cc1e9ef74571ac9d7b3ec338a6c SHA-256: b1ac86ef39ea16c2e9955c3a66b0b721ef70b8861ca9276cfe6f4d82b4bf020b
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

This PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. The critical heuristic indicates the exploit targets XFA forms and decodes a payload from a raw stream. The presence of embedded script payloads and XFA scripts further supports the execution of malicious code. The likely intent is to download and execute a secondary payload, though the specific script content is truncated and obfuscated, preventing a more detailed analysis of its actions.

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
7609bbffe05ac010a093fad41dd48c33ec2bd87ef1396918f2b4e81832386ad0
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101219 bytes