cuckoosandbox/cuckoo

★ 5,955JavaScriptAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Analyze suspicious files
      Isolated sandbox run
      Behavioral reporting
    Tech Stack
      Python
      JavaScript
      VirtualBox or KVM
    Use Cases
      Malware detection
      Incident response
      File safety checks
    Audience
      Security researchers
      IT security teams
    Status
      Version 2.x unmaintained
      Rewrite in progress

mindmap root((repo)) What it does Analyze suspicious files Isolated sandbox run Behavioral reporting Tech Stack Python JavaScript VirtualBox or KVM Use Cases Malware detection Incident response File safety checks Audience Security researchers IT security teams Status Version 2.x unmaintained Rewrite in progress

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Submit a suspicious email attachment to automatically find out if it contains malware before opening it on a real system.

USE CASE 2

Analyze ransomware or malware samples in an isolated VM to see exactly what system changes they attempt.

USE CASE 3

Automate malware triage for security incident response, processing batches of suspicious files in a queue.

USE CASE 4

Generate detailed behavioral reports showing a file's network connections, file system changes, and registry modifications.

Tech stack

PythonJavaScriptVirtualBoxKVM

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires a hypervisor such as VirtualBox or KVM for isolated guest VMs, this version (2.x) is unmaintained and should not be used in production.

In plain English

Cuckoo Sandbox is an open source tool that automatically analyzes suspicious files to determine whether they are malware. You give it a file you are unsure about, and within seconds it runs that file inside a safe, isolated environment and reports back exactly what happened: what the file tried to do, what system changes it made, and how it behaved overall. The "sandbox" part of the name refers to that isolated container, which keeps whatever the file does from affecting the rest of your real machine. The analysis is fully automated, so there is no need to set up manual testing steps. You submit a file, Cuckoo executes it, and the results describe the file's behavior in detail. This makes the tool useful for security researchers, IT teams responding to incidents, or anyone who needs to check whether a file is safe before opening it on a real system. The project was once considered the leading open source tool of its kind. The version stored in this repository (2.x) is currently not being maintained. The development team is working on a full rewrite of Cuckoo that has not yet been released, and open issues or pull requests on this version are unlikely to be addressed in the meantime. For those who still want to use the last stable build, it can be installed via a standard Python package manager command. Setup instructions and community discussion links are available on the Cuckoo website and in the documentation linked from the README. The team explicitly recommends against using this development branch in production. If you are looking at this repository hoping to use Cuckoo today, the short version is: the project works for what it was designed to do, but this version is on hold while the team rebuilds it from scratch.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

I have Cuckoo Sandbox installed. How do I submit a suspicious file for analysis and read the behavioral report it generates?

Prompt 2

Walk me through what Cuckoo Sandbox does step by step when it analyzes a file inside its isolated sandbox environment.

Prompt 3

How do I install Cuckoo Sandbox 2.x via pip and configure the basic environment to start analyzing suspicious files?

Prompt 4

What information does a Cuckoo Sandbox report include, what file system changes, network calls, and runtime behaviors does it capture?

Prompt 5

What are the known limitations of Cuckoo Sandbox 2.x and what should I know about its unmaintained status before using it?

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