Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b8b2cd4e3de21591…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.3 KB
MD5: 51ee11644cae64bab1eb0e1e24286f65 SHA-1: dcbfd27451536de52cca154ba69fae0937ffbfd7 SHA-256: b8b2cd4e3de215914aaf836d0c8003ffba9e142d43cc0c5beea8dad60c9c8a9d
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader's handling of XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, designed to be executed by the vulnerable reader. This exploit allows for arbitrary code execution on the victim's machine.

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
7aed2e198a40a4ebe5f655df4f138d656f6edad654ce96e271e769dbb7aed199
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 100919 bytes