Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c842e1bf1c0b5402…

MALICIOUS

PDF

75.8 KB
MD5: 521db52707134943afe735818944d76a SHA-1: 568d579b50701e01b0d7bf422021cc2bea70a06c SHA-256: c842e1bf1c0b5402dd87f78628e6edd4b9445250fcc1c522b2dae464f7860e38
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

This PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The embedded file and the specific exploit detection strongly suggest this document is designed to deliver a secondary malicious payload upon opening in a vulnerable reader.

Heuristics 7

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78
  • 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
97f9d6ab39d0c520160e3fb920c2eb87f66c51d2a3f97af063f0dd34d709d435
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 76875 bytes