Categories: Forensics Tools

Creating and Analyzing a Malicious PDF File with PDF-Parser Tool

This tool will parse a PDF document to distinguish the central components utilized as a part of the analyzed file. It won’t render a PDF archive.

Features included:

  • Load/parse objects and headers
  • Extract metadata (author, description, …)
  • Extract text from ordered pages
  • Support of compressed pdf
  • Support of MAC OS Roman charset encoding
  • Handling of hexa and octal encoding in text sections
  • PSR-0 compliant (autoloader)
  • PSR-1 compliant (code styling)

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Analyzing a Malicious PDF File

We have created the PDF file with an EXE file embedded with it.

Step 1: To launch the PDF parser type pdf-parser

root@kali:~# pdf-parser -h

 List all the options with PDFParser

Step 2: To get the stats of the PDF Document.

root@kali:~# pdf-parser -a /root/Desktop/template.pdf

Step 3: Passing stream data through Filters FlateDecode,ASCIIHexDecode, ASCII85Decode, LZWDecode, and RunLengthDecode.

root@kali:~# pdf-parser -f /root/Desktop/template.pdf

Step 4: To get the Hashes of the PDF file.

root@kali:~# pdf-parser -H /root/Desktop/template.pdf

Step 5: Case-sensitive search in streams

root@kali:~# pdf-parser –casesensitive /root/Desktop/template.pdf

Step 6: To get the javascript added to the document.

pdf-parser –search javascript –raw /root/Desktop/template.pdf

The stats option shows insights into the items found in the PDF report. Utilize this to recognize PDF archives with unusual/unexpected objects, or to characterize PDF records.

The search option scans for a string in indirect objects (not inside the surge of Indirect objects). The inquiry is not case-sensitive and is defenseless to obfuscation methods.

The filter option applies the filter(s) to the stream, whereas the raw option makes the pdf-parser output raw data.

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Gurubaran

Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.

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