analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf

analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf is a skill for Claude Code from mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills. It costs 73 tokens per session (803 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for examining the internal contents of suspicious PDF files, including embedded JavaScript, shellcode, and other objects.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate phishing attachments and PDF exploits, extract suspicious data, analyze scripts, and create detection signatures.
Why use it?
It helps expose hidden or encoded content in weaponized documents without relying on the PDF rendering process to reveal the threat.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the cybersecurity-skills plugin — 56 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate phishing attachments and PDF exploits, extract suspicious data, analyze scripts, and create detection signatures.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf
About the project

Anthropic Cybersecurity Skills is a library of structured cybersecurity procedures for AI agents, covering security domains and mappings to established security frameworks. It is for authorized security analysis, penetration testing, incident response, research, defense, and education across compatible AI platforms. The catalogue entries package parts of this library as agent skills, instructions, or a plugin.

mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills · 32,631 stars · on GitHub · mahipal.engineer

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills --skill analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cybersecurity-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 803 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 Apr 2026
  • Snyk pass 6 Apr 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00073 $0.00803
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00402
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00161
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00080

Measured 13d ago against content hash 7cdd9a208444, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/agent.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analyzing Malicious PDF with peepdf

When to Use

  • When triaging suspicious PDF attachments from phishing emails
  • During malware analysis of PDF-based exploit documents
  • When extracting embedded JavaScript, shellcode, or executables from PDFs
  • For forensic examination of weaponized document artifacts
  • When building detection signatures for PDF-based threats

Prerequisites

  • Python 3.8+ with peepdf-3 installed (pip install peepdf-3)
  • pdfid.py and pdf-parser.py from Didier Stevens suite
  • Isolated analysis environment (VM or sandbox)
  • Optional: PyV8 for JavaScript emulation within peepdf
  • Optional: Pylibemu for shellcode analysis

Workflow

  1. Triage with pdfid: Scan PDF for suspicious keywords (/JS, /JavaScript, /OpenAction, /Launch, /EmbeddedFile).
  2. Interactive Analysis: Open PDF in peepdf interactive mode to explore object structure.
  3. Identify Suspicious Objects: Locate objects containing JavaScript, streams, or encoded data.
  4. Extract Content: Dump suspicious streams and decode filters (FlateDecode, ASCIIHexDecode).
  5. Deobfuscate JavaScript: Analyze extracted JS for shellcode, heap sprays, or exploit code.
  6. Check VirusTotal: Use peepdf vtcheck to cross-reference file hash with AV detections.
  7. Generate IOCs: Extract URLs, domains, hashes, and shellcode signatures.

Key Concepts

Concept Description
/OpenAction Automatic action executed when PDF is opened
/JavaScript /JS Embedded JavaScript code in PDF objects
/Launch Action that launches external applications
/EmbeddedFile File embedded within the PDF structure
FlateDecode zlib compression filter used to hide content
Object Streams PDF objects stored in compressed streams

Tools & Systems

Tool Purpose
peepdf / peepdf-3 Interactive PDF analysis with JS emulation
pdfid.py Quick triage scanning for suspicious keywords
pdf-parser.py Deep object-level PDF parsing
VirusTotal Hash lookup and AV detection cross-reference
CyberChef Decode and transform extracted payloads

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 97 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 7cdd9a208444

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analyzing-malicious-pdf-with-peepdf is a skill published in the GitHub repository mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills (32,631 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 803 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.