Anti-Malware · head-to-head
MalDatabase vs MalwareBazaar
MalDatabase distributes daily-refreshed malware datasets and threat-intelligence feeds — file hashes, behavioral sandbox data, and contacted-domain lists — for use in research and machine-learning training sets. A live call to its real download host, api.maldatabase.com/download, with an Authorization header returned a plain-text 400 error rather than a CORS-enabled response, reconfirming API-key auth over HTTPS and resolving cors to no. Its published plans run from a free 50-samples/day researcher tier up to a $49.99/month Unlimited plan covering 2,000–2,500 samples/day.
MalwareBazaar, part of the abuse.ch threat-intel suite, is a community platform for submitting, tagging, and bulk-downloading real malware samples by hash, signature family, or YARA rule via its JSON API. A live POST to the real mb-api.abuse.ch host without an Auth-Key was rejected, and a bogus key returned {"query_status": "unknown_auth_key"}, confirming abuse.ch's mandatory Auth-Key authentication over HTTPS with no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on either response. Use is free under abuse.ch's fair-use policy, with a separate paid commercial API tier for organizations needing higher volume or an SLA.
| MalDatabase | MalwareBazaar | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | API Key | API Key |
| Pricing | freemium | freemium |
| Formats | JSON, CSV | JSON |
| CORS | no | no |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
MalDatabase supports 2 response formats, while MalwareBazaar offers fewer — pick MalDatabase for more integration flexibility.