Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b28b6f234ac336b2…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.5 KB
MD5: 2225a226220f949ce1504cb1f3cb4196 SHA-1: 1fbd3d9578b8039ac1f129ded78913168c3bb46a SHA-256: b28b6f234ac336b29c76e905601fa50c9e66bd2deac1398190d65eec92fabd66
138 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious PDF 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. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is a common technique for delivering exploits. The script itself appears to be obfuscated, but the primary intent is to leverage the known vulnerability to execute arbitrary code. The embedded URLs are related to XFA schemas and Adobe, but one is confirmed 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
967b06c9693675be648b7f0e1f78b2e8a11026646f9553eff8ee56340ada172e		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101172 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.