Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b1d3083dbf4766ba…

MALICIOUS

PDF

123.1 KB
MD5: e5cd808b4c16f0b865d7eff2a973bb1a SHA-1: 77cf520669756f0597b5ebd691f42862d6b4858a SHA-256: b1d3083dbf4766ba12a5c21697cf1cc8aced8dec060bcef45ed3c2e451d8f2b9
198 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

This PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, designed to be executed by the user opening the document. This exploit likely leads to the download and execution of a second-stage payload, as suggested by the ClamAV detection 'Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78'. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are related to XFA specifications.

Heuristics 7

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78
  • 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
e02fa30e45bb2a36ba7f43bc2b50c5fc9ffa2f298cf2b675985e4fd0ca0ac655
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 125255 bytes