Cisco MCP Scanner: MCP vendor profile
Cisco's open-source MCP Scanner checks MCP servers, tools, prompts and resources for malicious content by combining YARA rules, an LLM judge and the Cisco AI Defense inspect API, as documented by the vendor. The README gives a CI example that runs a YARA-only scan with no API keys needed (github.com).
At a glance
| Listed as | Cisco MCP Scanner (AI Defense) |
|---|---|
| Type | Security scanners |
| Operator | Cisco |
| Home | github.com |
| Price | open source, Apache-2.0 |
| Read | 5 November 2026 |
What it does for this layer
Cisco licenses MCP Scanner under Apache-2.0, and its GitHub page showed about 1.1k stars on 5 Nov 2026 (github.com, observed 5 November 2026). The README configures the LLM analyzer with model providers including AWS Bedrock Claude through an API key bearer token (github.com). The repository's About section links the Cisco blog post at blogs.cisco.com/ai/securing-the-ai-agent-supply-chain-with-ciscos-open-source-mcp-scanner (github.com).
Cisco's MCP Scanner "combines Cisco AI Defense inspect API, YARA rules and LLM-based analysis to detect malicious MCP tools" (github.com). The scanner's analyzers are selected with --analyzers, for example yara, llm and api, and can be run one at a time (github.com). Cisco MCP Scanner can scan the prompts and resources of a server as well as its tools, over remote or stdio connections (github.com).
Products and plans
| Product | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| MCP Scanner | Open-source Python scanner for MCP servers with YARA, LLM and API analyzers. | open source, Apache-2.0; from 0 USD; The API analyzer needs Cisco AI Defense access (source, as of 5 November 2026) |
Checks on its own domain
| Check | Domain | Result | Scanned | Method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ora cached score | cisco.com | 33 of 100, grade D | 30 October 2026 | how it was taken |
| Cloudflare agent-readiness scan | cisco.com | 20 of 100, L1 Basic Web Presence; 3 of 15 counted checks passed | 5 November 2026 | how it was taken |
What it does not do
- Cisco MCP Scanner does not block calls at runtime; it reports findings from scans.
- The API analyzer does not work without Cisco AI Defense credentials; YARA-only scans do.