Tag Archives: Context

Introducing Threat Signals: agentic skills for open-source threat intelligence, free for every Cloudflare account

Post Syndicated from Emilia Yoffie original https://blog.cloudflare.com/threat-signals/

Organizations can now scale threat intelligence expertise the way they scale infrastructure. Threat intelligence analysts and network defenders have long automated the ingestion of structured threat feeds to help enrich their SIEM or WAF. The harder work has always been unstructured reporting: turning a research post into indicators your tools can use, without losing the context that explains why they matter. AI skills make that work possible to automate. A skill is a set of rich, detailed instructions that captures how an experienced analyst handles one part of the job, and it runs the same way on every report. 

Threat Signals puts that process into practice at scale. It’s launching today, and we made it available to every Cloudflare account. 

Threat Signals turns open-source reporting that you choose into intelligence you can act on. Its agentic skills summarize reports, surface key context, extract and normalize indicators of compromise, and apply tags — all within a private, account-scoped dataset. The end result is a contextualized indicator stored in your account’s private Threat Intelligence dataset as a Threat Event that can instantly be applied in your WAF policy.

Starting today, we are also expanding access to Cloudforce One’s Threat Events Platform, our core threat intelligence offering, to all Cloudflare accounts for free. With this expansion, each account gets:

  • API and dashboard access to Threat Signals and the ability to select one RSS feed
  • A private dataset built from the RSS feed in Threat Signals, tailored to your reporting requirements and stored for up to 30 days
  • API and dashboard access to Threat Events Platform to investigate events, indicators, and tags related to your private dataset

Essentials, Advantage, and Elite enterprise customers can extend this offering to include an expanded number of RSS feeds, access to Cloudforce One’s proprietary threat intelligence datasets, the ability to generate custom agentic skills, higher storage options for Threat Signals’ derived open-source reporting, and the ability to create custom WAF rules on open-source and proprietary threat events.

Discovery is only the beginning

We started with open-source intelligence because it is the most obvious place to prove the power of agentic workflows. We also heard from customers that their existing platforms cannot scale beyond polling 100 RSS feeds. Recognizing the critical impact open-source reporting plays in understanding the threat landscape, we sought to build an infinitely scalable platform (more on that later).

Researchers regularly publish detailed findings on vulnerabilities, malicious infrastructure, phishing campaigns, malware families, and threat actors. While RSS feed readers make it easier to discover new reporting, discovery is only the beginning. Harnessing data into a usable workflow with consistent expertise is the key to building actionable defense.

Expertise has never been something organizations can replicate at scale. A report explains how a campaign works and identifies the infrastructure behind it, but before an analyst can use that information, they need to:

  • Read and summarize the report
  • Identify relevant indicators
  • Convert indicator values into a consistent format
  • Classify the report using an internal taxonomy for tagging
  • Populate the indicators into a threat intelligence platform (TIP)
  • Preserve a link to the original source
  • Share the intelligence with the rest of the security team

Repeating that process across dozens of sources takes time; moreover, almost every step is entirely about human judgment. As a result, context is lost. Indicators inserted into your TIP are separated from the context that explains why they matter and helps assess the risk later in the remediation cycle. It's not surprising that weeks later, a domain is pushed to a blocklist and nobody understands why. 

How Threat Signals works

Threat Signals uses RSS to monitor the open-source reporting that matters to your organization. You can add an RSS feed, give it a recognizable name and category, and configure how frequently Threat Signals checks for new content. All three feed specifications (RSS 2.0, Atom, and RSS 1.0/RDF) are supported.

Each feed you select enters a Workflow that periodically polls for new articles. It uses Browser Run’s Markdown quick action to fetch and clean the article text into a readable markdown format, which is then stored in R2. The text is passed into an indicator of compromise extractor and a set of default Cloudforce One-defined skills to summarize the content, apply tags based on your account configuration, and add indicator contextualization at the IOC level.

The output is a concise summary and key points that help an analyst quickly understand what happened, who was affected, and why the report matters. All of it is searchable and tagged, so you can find the articles you care about across the platform.

Lastly, each indicator extracted is backed by a threat event within the account's own private Threat Signals dataset. The event, its indicators and tags, and the original report stay connected, so an analyst can always trace where the intelligence came from and why it is there. These indicators can then be used to create WAF rules from threat events to protect your applications and infrastructure.

What we learned

It’s not hard to write a script that pulls an RSS feed and regexes IP addresses out of it. The first version of Threat Signals was a one-week internal prototype, built by a threat analyst who wanted more out of the reports she was already reading. Turning that into something every account can rely on was harder, and most of what slowed us down had nothing to do with parsing. The hard work was in making the output something analysts would trust and actually use. 

We were tempted to let the system invent whatever tags seemed useful. The teams we talked to pushed back: intelligence labeled in an unfamiliar vocabulary is harder to use, because now there are two vocabularies to reconcile. So we limited AI tagging to each account's existing tag catalog. 

Recording whether a tag was applied automatically or by an analyst sounds like a minor piece of metadata, but it turned out to be essential. In our experience, analysts were far more willing to trust automatic tagging when they could see exactly which tags it applied.

Summaries are useful, and they are what users notice first. But what analysts kept returning to in early testing was the link between an event and the report it came from. As investigations progressed, we discovered that link consistently helped them keep track of indicators and understand why each one mattered in the first place. 

What’s next

Open-source reporting isn’t limited to RSS feeds. Analysts need to be able to quickly consume threat intelligence in various formats and pipelines. Now that we’ve laid out the building blocks for ingesting indicators from data feeds into our platform, the natural next step is to add more consumers. Be on the lookout for more data ingestion pipelines that we will support so that you can bring more actionable intelligence onto the platform to protect your organization.

Open the Cloudflare dashboard and set up your feed today

The best investigations begin with trusted context, and Threat Signals helps keep that context close from the first lead onward. Threat Signals is now generally available for every Cloudflare account via API and the dashboard. Open the Cloudflare dashboard, navigate to Application Security → Threat Intelligence → Threat Signals, and add your RSS feed. The documentation is here. 

You can also read threat intelligence research from our team, and talk to your account team about putting Threat Events to work in your enterprise environment.

Unleashing improved context for threat actor activity with our Cloudforce One threat events platform

Post Syndicated from Alexandra Moraru original https://blog.cloudflare.com/threat-events-platform/

Today, one of the greatest challenges that cyber defenders face is analyzing detection hits from indicator feeds, which provide metadata about specific indicators of compromise (IOCs), like IP addresses, ASNs, domains, URLs, and hashes. While indicator feeds have proliferated across the threat intelligence industry, most feeds contain no contextual information about why an indicator was placed on the feed. Another limitation of most feeds today is that they focus solely on blockable indicators and cannot easily accommodate more complex cases, such as a threat actor exploiting a CVE or an insider threat. Instead, this sort of complex threat intelligence is left for long form reporting. However, long-form reporting comes with its own challenges, such as the time required for writing and editing, which can lead to significant delays in releasing timely threat intelligence.

To help address these challenges, we are excited to launch our threat events platform for Cloudforce One customers. Every day, Cloudflare blocks billions of cyber threats. This new platform contains contextual data about the threats we monitor and mitigate on the Cloudflare network and is designed to empower security practitioners and decision makers with actionable insights from a global perspective. 

On average, we process 71 million HTTP requests per second and 44 million DNS queries per second. This volume of traffic provides us with valuable insights and a comprehensive view of current (real-time) threats. The new threat events platform leverages the insights from this traffic to offer a comprehensive, real-time view of threat activity occurring on the Internet, enabling Cloudforce One customers to better protect their assets and respond to emerging threats.

How we built the threat events platform leveraging Cloudflare’s traffic insights

The sheer volume of threat activity observed across Cloudflare’s network would overwhelm any system or SOC analyst. So instead, we curate this activity into a stream of events that include not only indicators of compromise (IOCs) but also context, making it easier to take action based on Cloudflare’s unique data. To start off, we expose events related to denial of service (DOS) attacks observed across our network, along with the advanced threat operations tracked by our Cloudforce One Intelligence team, like the various tools, techniques, and procedures used by the threat actors we are tracking. We mapped the events to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and to the cyber kill chain stages. In the future, we will add events related to traffic blocked by our Web Application Firewall (WAF), Zero Trust Gateway, Zero Trust Email Security Business Email Compromise, and many other Cloudflare-proprietary datasets. Together, these events will provide our customers with a detailed view of threat activity occurring across the Internet.

Each event in our threat events summarizes specific threat activity we have observed, similar to a STIX2 sighting object and provides contextual information in its summary, detailed view and via the mapping to the MITRE ATT&Ck and KillChain stages. For an example entry, please see the API documentation.


Our goal is to empower customers to better understand the threat landscape by providing key information that allows them to investigate and address both broad and specific questions about threats targeting their organization. For example:

  • Who is targeting my industry vertical?

  • Who is targeting my country?

  • What indicators can I use to block attacks targeting my verticals?

  • What has an adversary done across the kill chain over some period of time?

Each event has a unique identifier that links it to the identified threat activity, enabling our Cloudforce One threat intelligence analysts to provide additional context in follow-on investigations.

How we built the threat events platform using Cloudflare Workers

We chose to use the Cloudflare Developer Platform to build out the threat events platform, as it allowed us to leverage the versatility and seamless integration of Cloudflare Workers. At its core, the platform is a Cloudflare Worker that uses SQLite-backed Durable Objects to store events observed on the Cloudflare network. We opted to use Durable Objects over D1, Cloudflare’s serverless SQL database solution, because it permits us to dynamically create SQL tables to store uniquely customizable datasets. Storing datasets this way allows threat events to scale across our network, so we are resilient to surges in data that might correlate with the unpredictable nature of attacks on the Internet. It also permits us to control events by data source, share a subset of datasets with trusted partners, or restrict access to only authorized users.  Lastly, the metadata for each individual threat event is stored in the Durable Object KV so that we may store contextual data beyond our fixed, searchable fields. This data may be in the form of requests-per-second for our denial of service events, or sourcing information so Cloudforce One analysts can tie the event to the exact threat activity for further investigation.


How to use threat events

Cloudforce One customers can access threat events through the Cloudflare Dashboard in Security Center or via the Cloudforce One threat events API. Each exposes the stream of threat activity occurring across the Internet as seen by Cloudflare, and are customizable by user-defined filters. 

In the Cloudflare Dashboard, users have access to an Attacker Timelapse view, designed to answer strategic questions, as well as a more granular events table for drilling down into attack details. This approach ensures that users have the most relevant information at their fingertips.

Events Table


The events table is a detailed view in the Security Center where users can drill down into specific threat activity filtered by various criteria. It is here that users can explore specific threat events and adversary campaigns using Cloudflare’s traffic insights. Most importantly, this table will provide our users with actionable Indicators of Compromise and an event summary so that they can properly defend their services. All of the data available in our events table is equally accessible via the Cloudforce One threat events API. 

To showcase the power of threat events, let’s explore a real-world case:

Recently leaked chats of the Black Basta criminal enterprise exposed details about their victims, methods, and infrastructure purchases. Although we can’t confirm whether the leaked chats were manipulated in any way, the infrastructure discussed in the chats was simple to verify. As a result, this threat intelligence is now available as events in the threat events, along with additional unique Cloudflare context. 

Analysts searching for domains, hosts, and file samples used by Black Basta can leverage the threat events to gain valuable insight into this threat actor’s operations. For example, in the threat events UI, a user can filter the “Attacker” column by selecting ‘BlackBasta’ in the dropdown, as shown in the image below. This provides a curated list of verified IP addresses, domains, and file hashes for further investigation. For more detailed information on Cloudflare’s unique visibility into Black Basta threat activity see Black Basta’s blunder: exploiting the gang’s leaked chats.


Why we are publishing threat events

Our customers face a myriad of cyber threats that can disrupt operations and compromise sensitive data. As adversaries become increasingly sophisticated, the need for timely and relevant threat intelligence has never been more critical. This is why we are introducing threat events, which provides deeper insights into these threats. 

The threat events platform aims to fill this gap by offering a more detailed and contextualized view of ongoing threat activity. This feature allows analysts to self-serve and explore incidents through customizable filters, enabling them to identify patterns and respond effectively. By providing access to real-time threat data, we empower organizations to make informed decisions about their security strategies.

To validate the value of our threat events platform, we had a Fortune 20 threat intelligence team put it to the test. They conducted an analysis against 110 other sources, and we ranked as their #1 threat intelligence source. They found us “very much a unicorn” in the threat intelligence space. It’s early days, but the initial feedback confirms that our intelligence is not only unique but also delivering exceptional value to defenders.

What’s next

While Cloudforce One customers now have access to our API and dashboard, allowing for seamless integration of threat intelligence into their existing systems, they will also soon have access to more visualisations and analytics for the threat events in order to better understand and report back on their findings. This upcoming UI will include enhanced visualizations of attacker timelines, campaign overviews, and attack graphs, providing even deeper insights into the threats facing your organization. Moreover, we’ll add the ability to integrate with existing SIEM platforms and share indicators across systems.

Read more about the threat intelligence research our team publishes here or reach out to your account team about how to leverage our new threat events to enhance your cybersecurity posture. 

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