MISP threat intelligence feeds setup

MISP ships with a catalog of default intelligence feeds, and the catalog is a starting point for discussion, not a list to switch on. Enabling every feed because it is available fills the instance with data that nobody has reviewed, and the cost shows up later as noise in correlation, duplicate indicators in detection tools and analysts who stop trusting what they see. The right first step is to decide which feeds match the organization's sectors, the tools that will consume the output, the sharing rules that apply to the data and the people who will act on it. Triage each candidate feed against four questions. First, does its subject matter fit your sectors and geographies, so that a feed about threats to a different industry does not generate alerts your team cannot act on? Second, which detection tools will use the output, and does your SIEM, firewall or DNS filtering accept the indicator types the feed produces, such as domains, IP addresses, file hashes or URLs? Third, what sharing rules apply: the feed's TLP marking, any restriction on republishing it to a sharing community and whether your own distribution settings can carry it without widening access. Fourth, who will review the results. A feed that produces hundreds of events a week needs a named analyst or an automated workflow to triage it, and if neither exists the feed should wait. Before enabling a feed, ask its owner four things and record the answers in writing. Ask how often the feed updates and whether updates are full snapshots or incremental changes, since that determines how you schedule pulls and how you expire old data. Ask which format it publishes in, such as the MISP format, STIX, CSV or freetext, because that affects whether MISP imports it as events, caches it for lookups or needs a custom parser. Ask about licensing and permitted use, including whether you may store, correlate and redistribute the data internally and to partners. Ask for the expected volume of indicators per update and how many of them are expected to expire. These answers must come from the feed provider, and the team should check them against its own review: confirm the volume with a trial pull, measure the false positive rate with the analysts who will work the output and confirm that the license covers how your team actually uses the data. Some default feeds will be useful only as lookup sources, and others may justify full event import. Decide that per feed after the triage, not from the catalog defaults. A feed that is enabled but never reviewed is a liability: it adds storage, correlation load and alert volume without adding a decision your team can make. Document the reason for each enabled feed, the owner who reviews it and the condition under which it will be disabled, so the catalog stays a deliberate selection as the organization changes.

Most noise from threat intelligence feeds does not come from volume alone. It comes from letting every imported indicator take part in correlation, tagging and sharing in the same way as analyst-created data. MISP's correlation engine matches attributes through exact matches and advanced patterns, including fuzzy hashes and CIDR overlaps, so a broad feed of IP ranges or loosely scored hashes can attach many weak links to events your team already relies on. Correlation across feeds compounds this. Two low-confidence feeds that describe the same common infrastructure produce matches that look like confirmation but carry little evidential weight. For each feed, decide how far its data is allowed to travel inside the instance and beyond it.

Start with the feed's role. A feed used only for lookups should run in cache-only mode, so its indicators are available for enrichment checks without being turned into events or correlated against your data. Feeds that carry curated, high-confidence indicators can be enabled for correlation, but only after you have reviewed a sample of what they produce. Feeds whose indicators need analyst judgment before anything is acted on are better imported as events, where a person can review and publish them. These choices are made in each feed's settings. The exact labels for caching, lookup visibility and correlation can differ between MISP versions, so confirm them against the release you run, which for new deployments is the 2.5 line recommended by the project.

Scope correlation deliberately. Enabling correlation on one feed is a decision about every event and attribute already in the instance, not just that feed's contents, so make the change after a test import on a non-production instance. Record how many correlations each feed produces on its first pull and agree on a review threshold with the analysts who will work those matches. Tags handle the sorting that correlation cannot. Apply a feed-origin tag and the relevant TLP tag at import so analysts and downstream filters can separate feed data from internal observations and exclude it when needed. Confirm whether the feed's source data already carries tags, because a tag added later may not reach attributes imported earlier.

Set distribution levels before any synchronization. MISP distributes events and attributes to other instances according to their distribution setting and sharing group, and feed-derived data pushed into a trusted community can multiply the noise you filtered locally. Choose a restrictive level for feeds that are not meant to leave the instance, and widen it only for feeds that a partner has agreed to receive. Taxonomies, galaxies and warning lists form the second layer. Warning lists flag known benign values, such as common public services, so they do not trigger detections, while taxonomies and galaxies give the remaining values consistent labels. The sibling topic on taxonomies, galaxies and warning lists covers which ones to enable and how to map them, and the workflows topic covers blocking publication when context is missing.

Before any feed is configured, your team needs to hand over a written candidate list. Each feed should have a named owner inside your organization, the license terms under which its data may be used, and a note on whether the source is a default catalog entry, a CSV feed or a freetext feed. Feeds arrive with different terms, and MISP's own content does not share one license. The MISP software is licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3, while taxonomies and galaxy data are licensed separately under CC0 1.0 Universal or the 2-clause BSD license. Your legal or procurement team should confirm the terms for each third-party feed, since the default catalog does not make those terms your terms. Ask who approves a new feed and who can withdraw one. Next, your team must define the sharing and distribution rules that apply to imported data. MISP supports distribution levels and custom sharing groups down to individual attributes, so the decision is not only whether a feed is useful but who may see it once it lands. Decide which distribution level is the default for imported events, whether any feed carries a restriction that must be preserved, and which trusted communities may receive your data through automatic synchronization. Write these rules down before the first import, because changing them after data has been shared is much harder than setting them correctly at the start. Third, name the detection tools that will consume the output. A feed is only valuable if something downstream acts on it, and the answer changes what gets imported. Your SIEM, endpoint platform, firewall or DNS filtering team should state which formats they need, such as STIX, CSV, Suricata, Snort, Zeek or RPZ, and how often they expect updates. If a consumer cannot use a particular attribute type, there is little reason to pull it into events. Ask each consuming team to confirm the format and the owner who will be paged when a feed produces noisy matches. Fourth, and most important, assign reviewers for imported data. Someone must own the review of what enters the instance, and that role cannot be left to whoever happens to run the service. The decisions that cannot be delegated to an automated process include which sources may be imported as events and which must stay cache-only, which feeds may be correlated against your internal data, and which indicators must be excluded before publishing. A cache-only feed supports lookups without creating events that other organizations might receive, so a source with restrictive terms or low confidence should usually start there. Record each decision with the reviewer's name and the date so the choice can be explained later. Finally, confirm who approves changes after go-live. Feed owners, the reviewer and the detection consumers should agree on a process for adding a feed, retiring one and handling a source that starts producing large volumes of low-value data. Ask your implementation partner to document those decisions in the scope, so that the handover identifies who maintains the feed list once the initial configuration is complete.