Hey folks, wanted to share a quick lesson learned the hard way with Recorded Future's integration into our CI/CD pipeline. I was super excited to automate our threat intel feeds into our security scanning stage using their APIs and Terraform. Got everything deployed, felt like a hero... until the alerts started flooding in.
The issue? We didn't set up any exclusion lists early on. Our internal build servers and temporary cloud resources (like those ephemeral containers for testing) were constantly triggering high-severity alerts. It created so much noise that the real, important threats were getting buried. The security team was not thrilled with us 😅.
Here’s the basic Terraform snippet I *wish* I had written from day one. It uses the `recordedfuture_rules` resource (or similar, depending on your module) to create an exclusion rule for our non-production VPC CIDR.
```hcl
resource "recordedfuture_exclusion_list" "non_prod_infra" {
name = "Exclude Non-Prod AWS VPC"
description = "Ignore alerts from our non-production environment CIDRs."
rule_conditions {
condition_type = "IpRange"
value = "10.10.0.0/16" # Our non-prod VPC
}
enabled = true
}
```
The key takeaways for anyone starting out:
* **Define your "known-good" infrastructure early:** Map out your internal IP ranges, development environments, and trusted third-party services *before* turning on the firehose.
* **Start with a pilot in monitoring mode:** Don't go straight to blocking. Let the data collect, analyze the false positives, and then build your exclusions.
* **Treat exclusions as code:** Just like your other IaC. It makes them reviewable, versionable, and repeatable across environments.
It took us a couple of weeks to clean up the alert fatigue. A little upfront planning would have saved so much time and made the automation actually useful from day one. Has anyone else run into this? How do you manage your exclusion lists dynamically, especially in a cloud environment with auto-scaling?
~CloudOps
Infrastructure as code is the only way
It's a common pattern in monitoring systems. I've seen the same thing happen when people first deploy LLM security scanners without context. They'll flag every use of a common API key pattern as a leak, even if it's just example code in a repository.
Your Terraform example is a good start. One thing I'd add is to make that CIDR block a variable from the start. You'll inevitably need to add more ranges, and hardcoding makes it brittle.
Also, consider if your exclusion logic should be based on tags or a naming convention, not just IP ranges. Cloud resources that spin up dynamically might not always land in the expected subnet.
BenchMark
Great point about tags! We got burned by that too when our auto-scaling group launched instances into a new, unexpected subnet. IP-based rules missed them completely.
Adding a tag like `ScanExclude = "true"` to our build templates and then having the security rule evaluate that tag saved us. It's a bit more upfront work in the Terraform for the tagging logic, but way more flexible long-term.
Love the callout on the API key example noise. That's another classic!
Infrastructure as code is the only way
You're absolutely right about tagging and naming conventions being more flexible than static IP ranges. That dynamic subnet problem is a killer.
One nuance I've run into: tag-based exclusion works beautifully in your own cloud, but breaks down when you're scanning third-party or open-source dependencies. For those, you often need a different layer - like a curated allow-list of known-safe patterns or libraries that gets updated independently. Combining both approaches (tag-based for your infra, pattern-based for external code) covers more ground.
I've also seen teams go overboard with exclusions and create blind spots. It's worth periodically auditing those lists. Maybe run a dry scan with all exclusions disabled quarterly, just to see what new noise has appeared.
Prod is the only environment that matters.