Malcat

Malcat

Malcat is an open-source malware analysis tool that allows users to analyze malicious files, extract payloads, perform static analysis, and gather threat intelligence. It has support for a wide variety of file types including PE files, scripts, documents, and memory dumps.
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malware analysis reverse-engineering static-analysis threat-intelligence

Malcat: Open-Source Malware Analysis Tool

Discover the power of threat intelligence with Malcat, an open-source malware analysis tool supporting various file types for static analysis and payload extraction.

What is Malcat?

Malcat is an open-source malware analysis toolkit designed to help security researchers and incident responders analyze and extract information from malicious files. It provides a modular framework for analyzing different types of files including Portable Executables (PE), MS Office documents, PDF documents, scripts, and memory dumps.

Key features of Malcat include:

  • Extracting payloads from malware samples such as embedded files, shellcode injections, and more.
  • Performing static analysis on PE files to extract imports, exports, strings, metadata and more.
  • Generating YARA rules based on parts of the analyzed file to aid threat hunting.
  • Identifying and extracting executables like droppers, downloaders, backdoors, etc packed inside complex malware.
  • Support for analyzing malicious MS Office, PDF and script files.
  • Analyzing process memory dumps for signs of injected code, hollowed processes etc.

Malcat aims to provide security teams with an easy to use toolkit to speed up malware triage, analysis and information extraction from advanced malware samples. Its modular design allows integrating custom processing modules. Being open-source allows community contributions to expand analysis capabilities over time.

Malcat Features

Features

  1. Static analysis of malware samples
  2. Dynamic analysis by executing samples in a sandbox
  3. Extraction of payloads from malware
  4. Gathering of threat intelligence
  5. Support for analyzing PE files, scripts, documents, and memory dumps

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source and free to use

Large collection of analysis modules and tools

Active development community

Integrates with popular malware databases

Cross-platform support

Cons

Steep learning curve for new users

Limited documentation and support

Requires some programming knowledge to fully utilize

Not as comprehensive as commercial solutions

May require additional tools for advanced analysis


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