Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c9afa9e39682a841…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.9 KB
MD5: e5c550d5a2f4966c2199507c26f8705c SHA-1: 70c6f05ed1ca59c64deb5ad44a9e9a5485cc685d SHA-256: c9afa9e39682a841c1f92250041a128d559378c85cbff46da7acae623d797519
138 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Malicious PDF T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The PDF contains embedded script payloads within XFA form elements, which are designed to execute arbitrary code. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are part of the XFA structure. The exact nature of the second-stage payload could not be determined due to obfuscation.

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
d2994cb5a91a6ce27a42c4bf1eef07111c33239d3c29a16f03a9d48837c0f477		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101509 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.