CAPE Sandbox vs MetaDefender Aether

CAPE Sandbox is an open-source malware analysis tool that runs suspicious files in isolated virtual machines, monitors their behavior, and collects forensic artifacts. It can record execution activity, files created or changed, network traffic in PCAP format, screenshots, and memory dumps. CAPE also performs dynamic malware unpacking, applies YARA classification to unpacked payloads, and extracts malware configurations through static and dynamic analysis.

Documented analysis targets include Windows executables and DLLs, PDFs, Office files, URLs, HTML, scripts, ZIP files, and Java JARs. A debugger can use YARA signatures for custom unpacking and configuration extractors, anti-sandbox countermeasures, and instruction traces. The Django web interface supports submissions, report browsing, and searching results; a REST API and Python functions support automated file and URL analysis. Setup requires host and guest machines, with each analysis run in a fresh virtual machine. GNU/Linux, preferably Ubuntu LTS, is the recommended host, and Windows 10 or Windows 11 23H2 the recommended guest. CAPE is free and self-hosted, and is distributed without warranty.

MetaDefender Aether has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.