Recipe Difficulty: Medium
Python Version: 3.5
Operating System: Any
VirusShare is the largest privately owned collection of malware samples, with over 29.3 million samples and counting. One of the great benefits of VirusShare, besides the literal cornucopia of malware that is every malware researcher's dream, is the list of malware hashes which is made freely available. We can use these hashes to a create a very comprehensive hash set and leverage that in casework to identify potentially malicious files.
In this recipe, we demonstrate how to automate downloading lists of hashes from VirusShare to create a newline-delimited hash list. This list can be used by forensic tools, such as X-Ways, to create a HashSet. Other forensic tools, EnCase, for example, can use this...