Actionable Threat Intel (IV) – YARA beyond files: extending rules to network IoCs

We are extremely excited to introduce YARA Netloc, a powerful new hunting feature that extends YARA supported entities from traditional files to network infrastructure, including domains, URLs and IP addresses. This opens endless possibilities and brings your hunting to a whole new level. Let’s get started!

YARA Netloc is based on extended functionality implemented for the “vt” YARA module. In particular, you will find now a new “.net” attribute specifically for network related entities such as URLs, domains and IP addresses. Here you can find the full documentation. Remember you can use the “vt” YARA module for any of your LiveHunt YARA rules.

Before we start working on a few examples it is important to highlight what resources you have available to get you quickly up to speed. First, our new YARA editor has available several templates you can use to build your rules. Second, the whole community can benefit from VirusTotal’s community rules in our new crowdsourced YARA github repository. The repository is split into four folders, each of which with rules matching different entities (file, domain, IP or URL).

Let’s start with a first example rule. The “New Livehunt Ruleset” dropdown on the Livehunt section now allows us to select what kind of YARA we want to create, depending on the entity we want to match against.