Getting started

YARA-X is a re-incarnation of YARA, a pattern matching tool designed with malware researchers in mind. This new incarnation intends to be faster, safer and more user-friendly than its predecessor. The ultimate goal of YARA-X is to serve as the future replacement for YARA.

With YARA-X you can create descriptions of malware families (or whatever you want to describe) based on textual or binary patterns. Each description (a.k.a. rule) consists of a set of patterns and a boolean expression which determine its logic. Let’s see an example:

rule silent_banker : banker {
    meta:
        description = "This is just an example"
        threat_level = 3
        in_the_wild = true

    strings:
        $a = {6A 40 68 00 30 00 00 6A 14 8D 91}
        $b = {8D 4D B0 2B C1 83 C0 27 99 6A 4E 59 F7 F9}
        $c = "UVODFRYSIHLNWPEJXQZAKCBGMT"

    condition:
        $a or $b or $c
}

Further reading#

• If you are completely new to YARA, you should start by learning how to write YARA rules.

• Seasoned YARA users may want to know about the differences between YARA-X and YARA