VirusTotal/yara

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

9831 stars · 1587 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

YARA is a pattern matching tool used to identify and classify malware families and other files based on textual or binary pattern rules. It runs multi-platform via a command-line interface or as a library, including a Python extension (yara-python).

Use cases

• identify and classify malware samples by pattern rules
• scan files for suspicious strings or binary signatures
• write rules to detect malware families
• scan memory dumps for indicators of compromise
• integrate pattern scanning into Python scripts
• hunt for threats across a file corpus

When to choose

• you need rule-based detection of malware or file patterns
• you want a widely adopted, battle-tested scanning engine with a large rule ecosystem
• you need cross-platform scanning from CLI or embedded library

When to avoid

• you want active development and modern performance - the project is in maintenance mode in favor of YARA-X
• you need general-purpose full-text search rather than rule-based binary matching

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

search-engine parser cli security security reverse-engineering developer-tools windows python cli cross-platform pattern-matching yara-rules malware-classification threat-detection file-scanning incident-response c malware-analysis linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="VirusTotal/yara")