Tools / Google SecOps Interview questions
What are the required sections of a YARA-L rule?
Every YARA-L rule must include, at minimum, a meta section, an events section, and a condition section, and these sections must appear in a defined order within the rule block rather than in any arbitrary sequence.
| Section | Purpose |
| meta | Describes the rule: author, description, severity, and other metadata |
| events | Defines the UDM event patterns the rule looks for, using event variables |
| condition | Specifies the logical condition over the defined events that triggers a detection |
This differs from classic YARA, where meta is optional and only condition is strictly required; YARA-L makes meta mandatory specifically because rules in a shared detection engine benefit from consistent documentation (author, purpose, severity) that classic YARA's original use case — ad hoc malware pattern matching — didn't require as strictly.
Beyond these three required sections, optional sections — match (for grouping/correlating across multiple events), outcome (for computing and returning derived values), and options (for rule-level execution settings) — extend a rule's capability for more advanced multi-event correlation and enriched alert output.
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