Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b9d77786ea40cfe2…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: 4c70318d915d6094e673d603d45f643f SHA-1: 3a4cfbbfae0cc5a3798f1df5a13b3e81166c19e7 SHA-256: b9d77786ea40cfe26a393e72af06c1239950e42392e21375c0061b3f92f9714d
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image processing. This exploit allows for arbitrary code execution. The presence of XFA forms and embedded script payloads further indicates malicious intent. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, though its exact functionality is obscured.

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
7d5e3802366ccf88cceece8e47a6439f258ef367726c96ec34d1869af345b21e
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101472 bytes