Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 d5007e9c6dcded22…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.4 KB
MD5: 73ba1aa7e27550344ee9da791788aec2 SHA-1: 250335aa3a10effe70e63b57c887d15152f9dd43 SHA-256: d5007e9c6dcded22c5e1844e3c4b71d263fd08c4befc4b725a4dab41d5dc837f
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. This exploit allows for the execution of arbitrary code, likely to download and run a second-stage payload. The presence of embedded scripts and an embedded file further supports the malicious intent. The embedded URLs are related to XFA schema but do not appear to be directly 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
fefafc5e346e7268dfe48ab2b72bd78a8a300e97c7172ed279950c494d2995bb
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101010 bytes