YARA and Python

The yara-python library can help you more easily integrate YARA into Python scripts: https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara-python


yara-python has a number of interesting applications in terms of scripting rule generation, rule management, rule scanning and more. There are a hundreds of interesting Python tools and projects that use yara-python for ease of automation, for example:


Michael Matonis used an older version of YARA’s Python library to generate rules, so it may no longer work with modern yara-python, but it serves to illustrate potential for scripting: https://github.com/matonis/yara_tools
Florian Roth’s Loki scanner uses yara-python: https://github.com/Neo23x0/Loki
Volatility uses yara-python to enable YARA scanning of memory: https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility3

The exact uses of yara-python are wildly variable based on implementation. As you become more interested in automating YARA for large scale rule generation, ruleset management or file scanning, you should explore using Python and yara-python.


Further Reading

https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara-python
https://yara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/yarapython.html
Check out other tools that integrate YARA for automation and scale:
https://github.com/InQuest/awesome-yara#tools
