Malicious PDF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 fd9ad7263a3fb505…

MALICIOUS

PDF

99.7 KB
MD5: b3be2d4d756ca331f4d6ca7647c67034 SHA-1: e0116b11963086ff62e0c386956cc14c1043369f SHA-256: fd9ad7263a3fb505fe1636ba58f03dd1740a2f5c9df7dc7219c75d9ef4d07b65
136 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a PDF file that exploits the CVE-2010-0188 vulnerability in Adobe Reader's LibTIFF component. This exploit is designed to achieve arbitrary code execution. The PDF also contains embedded scripts and an embedded file, suggesting it's a dropper or downloader for further malicious activity. The embedded script is heavily obfuscated, but the primary attack vector is the known XFA exploit.

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
5a781d4268198198332c30bfc32592322fd6e348266e93f826fe83cb8fbf7d56
pdf-embedded-file PDF EmbeddedFile object 8 at offset 0xC6 101308 bytes