Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b77d503f599bf227…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: 5a22c8d00435f8b00b6df450c032c4ed SHA-1: 181bbd9f53023b96057468e06a795d89e3c03c56 SHA-256: b77d503f599bf22729f5d6ee8f3a268be99e7c82d28f6ce7d8e318b0841e87f6
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file contains a critical heuristic indicating exploitation of CVE-2010-0188, a known vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The presence of embedded script payloads within the XFA form further supports this, suggesting the script is designed to download and execute a secondary payload. While the script content is truncated, the overall pattern points to a malicious PDF leveraging an old exploit for initial compromise.

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
60f123b6aadaf99e49ac17a48efd1ee5de1d50b5f4684c14b88883a54494039d		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101413 bytes

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