Cisco MCP Scanner
Scan MCP servers and tools for malicious behaviour with YARA rules, LLM analysis and Cisco AI Defense.
Sources and review
Checked against public documentation on . Suitability guidance is our editorial judgment; this is not a performance benchmark or an endorsement.
Vetting third-party MCP servers before letting agents use them.
You want scanning without any external service; the Cisco AI Defense engine needs its API, though the YARA engine does not.
About Cisco MCP Scanner
Cisco's open-source MCP Scanner checks MCP servers and tools for potential security findings using three engines that can run together or separately: YARA rules, LLM-based analysis and the Cisco AI Defense inspect API. It also scans Python dependencies for known vulnerabilities, and runs as a CLI or a REST API server.
Cisco MCP Scanner is an open-source project written primarily in Python, with 1.1k stars on GitHub. It was last updated in September 2026.
uv tool install --python 3.13 --from git+https://github.com/cisco-ai-defense/mcp-scanner cisco-ai-mcp-scannerCisco MCP Scanner vs. the alternatives
All 163 alternatives →| Record | Stars | Pricing | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cisco MCP Scannerthis listing | 1.1k | Python | Apache-2.0 | Open source |
| MCP Reference Servers | 91k | TypeScript | MIT AND Apache-2.0 | Open source |
| context7 | 62k | TypeScript | MIT | Open source |
| chrome-devtools-mcp | 53k | TypeScript | Apache-2.0 | Open source |
| Playwright MCP | 37k | TypeScript | Apache-2.0 | Open source |
| github-mcp-server | 33k | Go | MIT | Open source |
