Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 fd42f3276bb5e660…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.7 KB
MD5: 1502960f951043919e1d041f841778f9 SHA-1: 19961685f3f2998b6424655584f5b1f3ec925534 SHA-256: fd42f3276bb5e660aa0d7543d545cb97dbe97d01de4d0d1d9a05f3bb5045f404
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution

The sample is a PDF file that exploits CVE-2010-0188, a vulnerability in Adobe Reader related to XFA forms. The heuristic firings indicate the presence of an embedded script payload within an XFA form, which is designed to execute arbitrary code. This exploit is commonly used as a delivery mechanism for further malicious payloads.

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
6d7f6dd8e688ea54d9bf866aebd3bf92a9095c6c2ba9ce4aa677fa93bd7c42ce
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101376 bytes