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YARA – The pattern matching swiss knife (github.com/virustotal)
117 points by peter_d_sherman on Dec 6, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments


I use yara for real time screening in Django rest and it’s super fast and easy, Airbnb open sourced binary alert which is a cool serverless implementation.

https://github.com/airbnb/binaryalert


The part of the docs i want to skim to see what it does is nicely on one page: https://yara.readthedocs.io/en/stable/writingrules.html


Yara happens to power XProtect, macOS’s malware detection tool. It’s production-ready ;)


Yes, XProtect is deployed to all macs, but XProtect has a very small [1] number of signatures (~four dozen), compared to any windows AV engine (which would have thousands of signatures at a minimum.) This can't be because only four dozen possible malware families affect macOS, but we can speculate that it is either a performance issue (good sigs are costly [CPU/io]), a signature writing issue (Apple needs more malware peeps), or an image issue (if Apple put 10k signatures in XProtect, it would be admitting that 10k families of malware exist for macOS.)

IMO, Apple needs to improve the macOS malware detection situation before we consider their implementation 'production ready.'

[1] Official XProtect configuration: https://configuration.apple.com/configurations/macosx/xprote...


YARA has been a pleasure to work with ever since i switch from IDA with sigmaker to Ghidra with YaraGhidraGUI.

Really made me think of how to actually make patterns match asm by hand when needed.


Perhaps it's just me but I would expect a "pattern matching swiss knife" to at least have some machine-learning capabilities.


should be backed by blockchain too


Also quantum something just in case


all powered by a fusion reactor


Don't forget Turing Complete AI-ng


Whoaa horsey! We don't want some vc guy to wet himself looking at this thread


yes, and a subscription-based cloud service


it must be Cloud-native, and Big Data ready


No one mentioned Rust, sooo... It's going to be written in Rust, isn't it?




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