Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c9cf0831a9b0c7f2…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: a09ffbc140fded01963bd17a02afac31 SHA-1: f1b3bba2f477de1f7d3ef7f65ee38e3a9d47badb SHA-256: c9cf0831a9b0c7f25130112f44ecd3a15e57697a0146156d968c91b555fa43b6
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The critical heuristic indicates that the decoded XFA payload was matched, suggesting the exploit is designed to achieve arbitrary code execution. The presence of embedded script payloads and XFA forms further supports this. The embedded URLs are likely related to the XFA structure and do not appear to be malicious.

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
36b6ea9481c8981a644d1bfaeff9c960c79aafdafd7a21ce2d2b086db7678a7c		 pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101275 bytes

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