Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 f6e5ba34b0fa1c1c…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.6 KB
MD5: 4a11c13dbcf0c78b18c6f5bc8d3f42f9 SHA-1: 1b163c4b3e0bf770990839d301eeffc7ba25ef1c SHA-256: f6e5ba34b0fa1c1c7b81d912b921dfb4597e63d4977b2a9c3331a9412cf45458
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to LibTIFF and XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to execute arbitrary code. The embedded URLs, while not directly malicious, are associated with the XFA structure.

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
58ece6a135dba5b9633f97d6eeef45895bdaee4a674711d7669af66483b8fd4d
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101282 bytes