Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 f234836a3bcccf62…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.8 KB
MD5: f3ef6423a520318c7fdcbf0574a2d36d SHA-1: 48e9ca1bc98881f87dc596856269862e446a190d SHA-256: f234836a3bcccf626b693742fdf80cf3c29a734adf3b15687f0f2d269222b7e4
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The PDF file exploits CVE-2010-0188, a known vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms and LibTIFF parsing. The heuristic firings indicate an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is characteristic of exploit delivery. The script itself is heavily obfuscated, but the presence of the exploit and embedded script strongly suggests an attempt to download and execute a second-stage payload.

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
8ef67e3396769a66e49033634578a828abd62f64fcac0fa7ac2f3addfd4c5aee
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101474 bytes