Cuckoo Sandbox

Overall Opinion: The war between internet security experts and criminals is constantly escalating. For every new security measure devised, a dozen creative new threats crop up. That means that security professionals need to always be aware for new threats and how to analyze them. Cuckoo Sandbox is a piece of forensics and analysis software that helps you take a closer look at suspicious software, dig deep into its components, and determine the threat level and nature of it. Created by Claudio Guarnieri during the 2001 Summer of Code, it's since become embraced by the community as one of the better forensics tools around. In large part, this is due to its modular structure. As an open source program, developers throughout the world are free to work with it, exponentially increasing its functionality and allowing the software to adapt to the constantly changing world of internet security. Cuckoo Sandbox works effectively with Android, Windows, Linux, and iOS systems, and it automates the process of dealing with malware. Companies throughout the world are starting to incorporate it into the front and back ends of their servers, and a large reason for that is how easy it is to integrate. The open source nature and versatile platform compatibility means you can get it up and running with little substantive effort, and the customization means that system administrators can tinker with the framework until its functionality suits the specific needs of their company. The three main components: the analysis environment, analysis results processing, and reporting stage are all open to customization. At its heart, Cuckoo Sandbox serves a very simple but very necessary function, but it achieves that function with a high level of care and fidelity. Analysis is available for most files that could be successfully weaponized by online criminals and include office documents, emails, and executables. It can also check the safety of websites and provide a detailed analysis of the presence of malware. It does this through the use of virtualized environments to prevent the threat of infection to local machines. Analysis includes a detailed representation of its behavior as well as how it communicates with the API. All of this is then displayed in information that's easily digestible even by those without years of security experience. How pieces of malware communicate with their source can tell you a lot about their nature, and Cuckoo Sandbox analyzes the network traffic associated with the corrupted site or file. Even data encrypted through SSL/TLS protocol is subject to scrutiny in the Cuckoo Sandbox framework. Finally, Cuckoo Sandbox uses Virtuality to analyze the memory of the infected virtual system. By examining the symptoms an infected system contracts from malware, it's much easier to determine the nature of the threat and help develop a cure to stop it at its root.

Pros: A pioneer of malware sandbox frameworks, and still a leader in the industry Open source nature means that anyone can upgrade and modify it to their whims Support from over a hundred different developers on GitHub

Cons: Smaller team and high usage means that updates and support are sometimes slow Development team can be slow to respond to pull requests