Malware Samples for Students
Where are aspiring cybersecurity professionals able to collect malware samples to practice their reverse engineering and cyber defense techniques? You can run a honeypot, download samples from known malicious URLs on current blacklists, or skip the data collection steps and get samples directly from a variety of large repositories.
References
- Blog posts by Lenny Zeltser
- Malware Sample Sources for Researchers
- How to Share Malware Samples With Other Researchers
- Specialized Honeypots for SSH, Web and Malware Attacks
- Blacklists of Suspected Malicious IPs and URLs
- Free Automated Malware Analysis Sandboxes and Services
- Free Toolkits for Automating Malware Analysis
- Free Online Tools for Looking up Potentially Malicious Websites
- Lenny Zeltser is CISO at Axonius. An expert in incident response and malware defense, he is also a developer of Remnux: A Linux Toolkit for Reverse-Engineering and Analyzing Malware
Malware Repositories
(Last tested: January 2022)
- VirusShare: https://virusshare.com/
- Requires login (free)
- ZIP password is “infected"
- Run by J Michael Roberts, Vice President - Incident Response at Stroz Friedberg
- Contagio: http://contagiodump.blogspot.com/
- Requires password (free)
- Run by Mila Parkour, malware researcher at Deep End Research
- Related blog: http://contagiominidump.blogspot.com/
- The Zoo: http://thezoo.morirt.com/ / https://github.com/ytisf/theZoo
- Curated repository of malware available in a single download
- Look in
malwares/Binariessubdirectory - ZIP password is “infected"
- Malshare: https://malshare.com
- Immediate access - register to get an API key allowing download of 1000 samples/day
- Founded by Silas Cutler - https://twitter.com/silascutler
- Das Malwerk: http://dasmalwerk.eu/
- Immediate access
- ZIP password is “infected”
- Virusign: http://www.virusign.com/ (Offline as-of Jan 2022)