Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cfd924834f160cc2…

MALICIOUS

PDF

11.8 KB
MD5: 358ddc8a743b2097038b37bc7a2f6c5c SHA-1: 65e40be997e1a2a4d78791c9e69f45d4bdd534e4 SHA-256: cfd924834f160cc232c89ab9fce3a4bd8a798a9f1ccff7cf5771ba5a819e3a25
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell

The PDF file contains an embedded script and triggers critical heuristics for CVE-2010-0188, indicating it's an exploit targeting Adobe Reader. The ClamAV detection further confirms its malicious nature. The embedded script likely serves to download and execute a second-stage payload, although its exact function is obscured by the exploit.

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
8743206bc60d8bca3303f83e18b9e789275fb1036481be6ca4287fe07f1f1c36
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC8 11286 bytes