Use of hash metadata in yara
<p>The metadata section of a yara rule often has one or more hashes. Ex:
hash = "27a0a98053f3eed82a51cdefbdfec7bb948e1f36"
there can sometimes be 100 or more of these. How are they used, if at all? The yara docs and google searches make no mention of them. Are they MD5's, SHA-1's or something else?  Will yara flag files with hashes that match? Automatically without the rule telling it to? Yara as a hash library and a hash.md5() ftn for this purpose so why are these in the metadata? Thanks for any help. </p>