YARA alternatives

Malice is a malware analysis that wants to provide a free and open source version of VirusTotal. The goal of Malice is to make it usable by both independent researchers up to fortune 500 companies.

Malice is useful for those that do malware analysis or deal with user-generated files that may contain malware. The framework allows scanning files and directories to see if they are infected.

MultiScanner helps malware analysts by providing a toolkit to perform both automated and manual analysis. The data extracted from the analysis can be easily stored together, including the relevant metadata and samples. It allows enriching the data further by retrieving information from external resources.

SSMA is short for Simple Static Malware Analyzer. The tool can perform a set of tests against a malware sample and retrieve metadata from it. SSMA can analyze ELF and PE and analyze its structure. For example, it can retrieve the PE file header information and its sections. Other pieces it can analyze is the usage of packers, anti-debugging techniques, cryptographic algorithms, domains, email addresses, and IP addresses. It can also check if the sample is already detected or blocked by using VirusTotal and the blocklist of malwaredomains.com.

BANG is a framework to unpack files recursively and scan them. The files can be firmware, binaries, or malware. The main goal is to scan all files and perform classification and labeling. This way each file can be further analyzed based on the characteristics.

Mal Tindex is a tool that performs binary analysis on malware samples. It analyzes the binaries it is provided to learn about the specifics of each malware sample that makes them unique. This way data can be gathered that may provide background information. For example, it could provide the attribution of a particular actor or malware campaign.

YaraGuardian provides a web-based interface that helps to manage Yara rules. It can be used to search, organize, and bulk-edit rules. The tool also prevents creating duplicate entries, which is a nice additional benefit of this management utility.

With bamfdetect, malware and bots can be analyzed. It identifies and extracts information and returns data in JSON format.

Malscan is a tool to scan for malicious software (malware) such as viruses, worms, and backdoors. Its goal is to extend ClamAV with more scanning modes and signatures. It targets web servers running Linux, but can also be used on mail servers and desktops.

Intrigue Core provides a framework to measure the attack surface of an environment. This includes discovering infrastructure and applications, performing security research, and doing vulnerability discovery.

Intrigue also allows enriching available data and perform OSINT research (open source intelligence). The related scans include DNS subdomain brute-forcing, email harvesting, IP geolocation, port scanning, and using public search engines like Censys, Shodan, and Bing.

LMD uses MD5 file hashes and HEX pattern matches to define the malware signatures. These are used to detect malware.

Rootkit Hunter is a small utility to find suspicious rootkit components. Other known backdoors or malicious software can also be discovered, especially if it has the goal to hide.

The tool uses different ways to hunt, like using predefined directory locations and comparing the output of system utilities. Another method is by requesting a specific output and see if this output is altered, therefore tricking rootkits to reveal themselves.

Cutter is a graphical user interface for radare2, the well-known reverse engineering framework. It focuses on those who are not familiar enough with radare2, or rather have a graphical interface instead of the command-line interface that radare2 provides.

LIEF is short for Library to Instrument Executable Formats.

PyREBox is short for Python scriptable Reverse Engineering Sandbox. It provides dynamic analysis and debugging capabilities of a running QEMU virtual machine. The primary usage is the analysis of running processes to perform reverse engineering. PyREBox can change parts of the running system by changing data in memory or within processor registers.

Radare2 is a popular framework to perform reverse engineering on many different file types. It can be used to analyze malware, firmware, or any other type of binary files. Besides reverse engineering, it can be used for forensics on filesystems and do data carving. Tasks can be scripted and support languages like JavaScript, Go, and Python. Even software exploitation is one of the functions it can be used in.

ClamAV is a popular tool to detect malicious software or malware. While it calls itself an antivirus engine, it probably won't encounter many viruses, as they have become rare. It is more likely to find other forms of malware like worms, backdoors, and ransomware. ClamAV can be used in a few ways, from doing an occasional scan up to scanning in batch. ClamAV does not do on-access scanning but can be combined with other tools to obtain similar functionality. ClamAV is often used to support scanning incoming emails for malicious content.

The main reasons to use Dagda is the detection of vulnerable or malicious components within your containerized environment.

The chkrootkit tool consists of multiple parts that may detect the presence of rootkit parts of rootkit behavior on a system.

Some areas that are checked include:

• interface in promiscuous mode
• lastlog deletions
• wtmp deletions
• wtmpx deletions
• signs of LKM trojans
• utmp deletions

MISP collects, stores, and distributes security indicators and discovered threats. This makes the platform useful for those involved with security incidents and malware research. Users benefit from having a well-tested platform to structure the vast number of data points available when it comes to security threats. The tooling allows interaction with other tools, like security incident and event management (SIEM) and intrusion detection systems (IDS).