YARA
The pattern-matching engine for malware researchers — write rules to identify and classify malware by textual or binary signatures.
YARA
YARA is the pattern-matching Swiss-army knife for malware researchers. It provides a rule language for describing malware families and other files of interest based on textual or binary patterns, then scans files, processes, or memory to identify matches. Each rule pairs a set of strings with a boolean condition, making detection logic expressive yet readable.
Key features
- Concise rule language combining string, hex, and regex patterns with boolean conditions
- Scans files, running processes, and memory dumps
- Modules (PE, ELF, Mach-O, hashes, and more) for structured, format-aware matching
- Fast C engine with official Python bindings (yara-python) and a CLI
- Portable across Windows, Linux, and macOS
Maintained by VirusTotal, YARA is a de facto standard for malware classification and threat hunting: analysts share rule sets to detect specific implants, packers, and campaign artifacts across large sample corpora. Because rules are plain text, they integrate cleanly into automated pipelines, sandboxes, and incident-response tooling. With BSD-3-Clause licensing and broad industry adoption, it remains a foundational building block for malware analysis and detection engineering.
Curated mirror of the open-source YARA (BSD-3-Clause). Get it from the source.