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Maltrieve originated as a fork of mwcrawler. It retrieves malware directly from the sources as listed at a number of sites. Currently we crawl the following:
Other improvements include:
- Proxy support
- Multithreading for improved performance
- Logging of source URLs
- Multiple user agent support
- Better error handling
- VxCage, Viper and Cuckoo Sandbox support
Maltrieve requires the following dependencies:
- Python 2 plus header files (2.6 should be sufficient)
- BeautifulSoup version 4
- feedparser
- python-magic
- Requests
With the exception of the Python header files, these can all be found in requirements.txt. On Debian-based distributions, run sudo apt-get install python-dev. On Red Hat-based distributions, run sudo yum install python-devel. After that, just pip install -e .. You may need to prepend that with sudo if not running in a virtual environment, but using such an environment is highly encouraged.
Alternately, avoid all of that by using the Docker image
Basic execution: maltrieve (if installed normally) or python maltrieve.py (if just downloaded and run)
usage: maltrieve [-h] [-p PROXY] [-d DUMPDIR] [-l LOGFILE] [-x] [-v] [-c] [-s]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-p PROXY, --proxy PROXY
Define HTTP proxy as address:port
-d DUMPDIR, --dumpdir DUMPDIR
Define dump directory for retrieved files
-l LOGFILE, --logfile LOGFILE
Define file for logging progress
-x, --vxcage Dump the files to a VxCage instance
-v, --viper Dump the files to a Viper instance
-r, --crits Dump the file and domain to a CRITs instance
-c, --cuckoo Enable Cuckoo analysis
-s, --sort_mime Sort files by MIME type
Many of Maltrieve's command line options can be specified in maltrieve.cfg.
Cron can be used to automate the execution of Maltrieve. The following example is provided to help get you started. It will create a cron job that will run Maltrieve every day at 2:01 as a standard user. That said, we recommend enhancing this by creating a custom script for production environments.
As a user, execute
crontab -e
If installed normally, add the following to the end of the file.
01 02 * * * maltrieve <optional flags>
If downloaded to a folder and executed, add the following to the end of the file.
01 02 * * * cd </folder/location> && /usr/bin/python maltrieve.py <optional flags>
Red Hat systems will need to ensure that the user is added to the /etc/cron.allow file.
Maltrieve doesn't do analysis. In addition to the integrations listed above, we can recommend using VirusTotalApi for working with VirusTotal. Malwr is a similar site based on Cuckoo Sandbox.
Released under GPL version 3. See the LICENSE file for full details.
We list all the bugs we know about (plus some things we know we need to add) at the GitHub issues page.
Aside from pull requests, non-developers can open issues on GitHub. Things we'd really appreciate:
- Bug reports, preferably with error logs
- Suggestions of additional sources for malware lists
- Descriptions of how you use it and ways we can improve it for you
Check the contributing guide for details.