Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e96cce56ea4eeac1…

MALICIOUS

PDF

82.4 KB
MD5: fa6c68e4aa6f32923a5a4a171d808e08 SHA-1: f6c6c23ecf48653581153b39f69ba2277c8db25c SHA-256: e96cce56ea4eeac186ade9da45e6161f8789817b06fd05a1489993c048b39292
196 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.001 Malicious Link: Malicious Link T1204.002 Malicious Link: Malicious File T1566 Phishing T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment T1566.002 Phishing: Spearphishing Link

The sample is a PDF document that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF XFA image parsing. This exploit allows for the execution of arbitrary code, likely to download and execute a second-stage payload. The presence of embedded scripts and the ClamAV detection further confirm its malicious nature.

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-93 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Pdf.Exploit.Dropped-93
  • 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
09a54b198a778d8c0b3b167f4e5e47a6d33b7336aca7cb674d9a49fc0eb5e889
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 83653 bytes