Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e91fe0004e767e82…

MALICIOUS

PDF

86.0 KB
MD5: 6b180d23df08a21fea5c376989bc9288 SHA-1: 03bda05b582858c16473309275772624b0afdd9c SHA-256: e91fe0004e767e8235c5499d1e905a1542d83315ee5e2f5d326e02df3880133e
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

This PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader's handling of LibTIFF XFA images. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The ClamAV detection 'Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-78' further confirms its malicious nature. The embedded script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload.

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
e9de27364247dec690865d940190ba082f776e8d5967af63cf0ff1135691d277
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 87261 bytes