Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c652d8a0ff5e6d87…

MALICIOUS

PDF

5.1 KB Authoring application: sarb First seen: 2026-05-08
MD5: 56476c75a9612ea32b492f15f59beba0 SHA-1: faa3ab1b6117d6faa64163fca50f99ee39b6d222 SHA-256: c652d8a0ff5e6d87bdc25d9d6a91188a45ca3aa5507cdb9e929cdac3047e3ff2
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File

The PDF file contains an embedded JavaScript file, indicated by the 'PDF_EMBEDDED_SCRIPT_PAYLOAD' heuristic. This embedded script is the primary indicator of malicious activity. The script itself is large and potentially obfuscated, but its presence strongly suggests it's designed to download and execute a second-stage payload. The 'EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE' heuristic also flagged this embedded artifact as suspicious. Due to the nature of embedded scripts in PDFs, the likely attack pattern is a downloader.

Machine Learning

  • Nyx PDF Classifier malicious score 1.0000

Heuristics 9

  • 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.
  • PDF embedded file could not be fully decoded medium PDF_EMBEDDED_FILE_UNDECODED
    A declared PDF /EmbeddedFile stream uses filters that the scanner could not decode. The raw stream was carved for artifact triage because malformed or unsupported attachment filters can hide payload content from normal extraction.
  • 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 script payload in PDF stream info 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.
  • Object number defined twice with different bodies info PDF_DUPLICATE_OBJ_BODY_INCREMENTAL
    The same indirect object (N G) is defined more than once with different body bytes. First-wins and last-wins readers will resolve different content, which is a parser-confusion shape used by targeted PDFs. Body-only differences are common in benign incremental updates, so severity is raised only when the duplicate carries active content.
  • PDF differential parser failed info PDF_DIFFERENTIAL_PARSE_FAILED
    The cross-check parser (pdfminer.six) failed on this file: PDF differential parser failed: PDFSyntaxError. Static heuristics still ran and any of their findings above are valid; only the differential cross-check signal is missing.
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.
  • 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/\ In PDF document text
    • http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-template/2.5/In PDF document text
    • http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-data/1.0/In PDF document text

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
stream_001_off000002e4.js decompressed-pdf-stream PDF FlateDecoded stream at offset 0x2E4 62489 bytes
SHA-256: ca4ad73d0d54c85ea25497d5b69ef71327d34e8853b345ec4ec5d6c96cf692bf
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 3 long base64-like blob(s).