Skip to content

Yara

All about Yara "The pattern matching swiss knife for malware researchers (and everyone else)" (Virustotal., 2020)

With such a fitting quote, Yara can identify information based on both binary and textual patterns, such as hexadecimal and strings contained within a file.

Using a Yara rule is simple. Every yara command requires two arguments to be valid, these are: 1) The rule file we create 2) Name of file, directory, or process ID to use the rule for.

$ yara myrule.yar somedirectory

Yara Rules

Anatomy of a Yara Rule Anatomy of a Yara Rule

Strings

Single string 

rule helloworld_checker{
    strings:
        $hello_world = "Hello World!"

    condition:
        $hello_world
}

Any string 

rule helloworld_checker{
    strings:
        $hello_world = "Hello World!"
        $hello_world_lowercase = "hello world"
        $hello_world_uppercase = "HELLO WORLD"

    condition:
        any of them
}

Conditions

We have already used the true and any of them condition. Much like regular programming, you can use operators such as:

<= (less than or equal to)
>= (more than or equal to)
!= (not equal to)

For example, the rule below would do the following: 

rule helloworld_checker{
    strings:
        $hello_world = "Hello World!"

    condition:
        $hello_world <= 10
}

The rule will now:

  1. Look for the "Hello World!" string
  2. Only say the rule matches if there are less than or equal to ten occurrences of the "Hello World!" string

Combining keywords

Moreover, you can use keywords such as:

and
not
or

rule helloworld_checker{
    strings:
        $hello_world = "Hello World!" 

        condition:
            $hello_world and filesize < 10KB 
}

resorces

LOKI

LOKI is a free open-source IOC (Indicator of Compromise) scanner created/written by Florian Roth.

Based on the GitHub page, detection is based on 4 methods:

File Name IOC Check
Yara Rule Check (we are here)
Hash Check
C2 Back Connect Check

There are additional checks that LOKI can be used for. For a full rundown, please reference the GitHub readme.

LOKI can be used on both Windows and Linux systems and can be downloaded here.

valhalla

https://valhalla.nextron-systems.com/