Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c36a624404a7c8d4…

MALICIOUS

PDF

78.8 KB
MD5: 6d1e2f8937b839dfb2b5beb4d5b5a7f5 SHA-1: d30aaade52d9b0978772ef01754f009c34d8cfc1 SHA-256: c36a624404a7c8d4ceadc7907a145918d61b49048de4ac04e962f4cf15755ff9
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious PDF T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The critical heuristic indicates a matched decoded XFA payload from a raw stream, suggesting the PDF is designed to deliver a malicious exploit. The presence of embedded scripts within the XFA form further supports this, as these scripts are often used to download and execute secondary payloads.

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
020c2117de0a27827fb28286c36d6cdcd8743aa30c0f1a71f98dad651b071312
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 79971 bytes