Introducing Gallus Gallus is a web-based malware detection service specifically to extract and analyze suspected malicious PDF documents. It is a free service designed to help security researchers and public to detect exploits and extract other useful information contained in PDF documents. How Gallus Works Gallus is designed to extract and analyze the malicious components […]
From Adobe Reader exploit to Foxit Reader exploit
Today, Gallus received a PDF sample submission with md5 hash 37b98d28762ceeaa5146e2e0fc0a3fdd. Marked as malicious, I was compelled to investigate further on this sample after looking at the potential malware URL produced by Gallus report. The PDF sample contains URLDownloadToFile payload that points to hxxp://77.x.y.Z/webmail/inc/web/load.php?stat=3DWindows. Traversing the URL at hxxp://77.x.y.Z/webmail/inc/web/, I managed to retrieve the HTML […]
PDF Stream Filters – Part 2
It is very interesting to study the obfuscation techniques used by the attackers in malicious PDF docs. As of my previous blog entry, one of the simplest, yet interesting obfuscation technique used is the cascading filtering. This basically means that the malicious JavaScript code is embedded below the multiple layers of encoded stream. In this […]
PDF Stream Filter – Part 1
One of the challenges in analyzing malicious PDF document is stream filtering. Malicious contents in PDF file are usually compressed with stream filtering thus making analysis a bit complicated. In a PDF document , stream object consists of stream dictionary, stream keyword, a sequence of bytes, and endstream keyword. A malicious content inside PDF file […]
Embedded Zbot trojan inside PDF file
We came across this new variant of malicious PDF that contains a ZBot infostealer Trojan. When a user open the PDF file, a pop up will ask the whether the user would like to save a file called Royal_Mail_Delivery_Notice.pdf. The unsuspecting user might assume that the file is just a PDF file, and therefore will […]
/Info does give an info :)
Common PDF dictionary used inside malicious PDF are /Author, /Producer, /Title, and /Subject which use reference from this.info.author, this.info.producer, this.info.title, and this.info.subject respectively. The PDF dictionary mentioned above are located inside the /Info referenced object. This can be identified from the reference variable above (e.g: this.info.title) used inside JavaScript code. For instance; this /* means […]
Yet another PDF Analyz3r
[A blog post by Ahmad Azizan, practical student @ MyCERT] Until today, the attack on client-side through Adobe Reader’s vulnerabilities are not slowing down. Even though the patches for known Adobe Reader’s vulnerabilities has been released to public for quite a moment, but there is still a lot of website that hosted the malicious PDF […]