Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 f36ed96c9563a86d…

MALICIOUS

PDF

53.1 KB
MD5: 8453fef6693cd62f19eef95a63c3f9bf SHA-1: 081650220b4676d7a5b27efd344bfcf12a91b860 SHA-256: f36ed96c9563a86d7182a72b50e7f04f369a7db7e54c548373a66018e94e5e39
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.001 PowerShell

The PDF file contains an embedded script payload and triggers a critical heuristic for CVE-2010-0188, an Adobe Reader LibTIFF XFA image exploit. This indicates the document is designed to exploit this vulnerability upon opening. The embedded file and XFA script further support the malicious intent, likely for downloading and executing 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
9ef8b9f5f74ca2ed4c17877e890a1c0a7fa7943cd776f0d30b82d538ba4426c2
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 53619 bytes