I’d guess the former, given it’s tiny compared to normal droppers, but you can never be sure these days.
This sample is a multi-platform ‘polyglot’ binary acting as a dropper and potentially a browser-based exploit. It functions as a Windows PE (with no standard imports, suggesting custom shellcode or manual API resolution), a Linux shell script, and an HTML/JavaScript file. The Linux component contains a command (‘tail -c+4294 $0 | lzma -dc > /tmp/a’) that extracts and executes a hidden payload from its own body. The embedded JavaScript is obfuscated and uses ‘eval’ to execute dynamically generated code. This structure is typical of sophisticated malware or cross-platform exploit delivery kits.
VirusTotal doesn’t like it https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/ede115f31fb3fcc3c27bad1b6da5cfee30bd692c3fc04ca1e8f0e8f43787b66f
Either it’s because it’s using the same technique as malware, or because it’s malware.
I’d guess the former, given it’s tiny compared to normal droppers, but you can never be sure these days.