Hey everyone,
I've been exploring Recorded Future's API for a while now, mostly using their intelligence to enrich our SIEM alerts. Lately, I've been wondering about taking the next step: moving from *detection* to *automated prevention*. Specifically, using their real-time threat data to trigger immediate block actions in our infrastructure.
The concept seems straightforward: a webhook from RF hits a Lambda function, which then updates a security group, WAF rule, or even a Kubernetes NetworkPolicy. But the devil's in the details—and the potential for false positives is scary.
Has anyone actually built a pipeline like this in production? I'm particularly curious about:
* **Trigger Logic:** What RF data points are reliable enough to act on automatically? (e.g., IPs tagged with "Malware" *and* high confidence scores?)
* **Action Targets:** Where are you applying the blocks? We're mostly on AWS, so my first thoughts were:
* AWS Network ACLs or Security Groups (for EC2/ECS)
* AWS WAF rules (for fronting ALBs/CloudFront)
* Direct updates to our Istio AuthorizationPolicies via a Kubernetes operator.
* **Safety Mechanisms:** How do you build in rollbacks or manual overrides? A mandatory approval step via SQS queue before the Lambda acts? A short, automatic block TTL?
If you've tried this, I'd love to see a high-level architecture diagram or even a snippet of how you parse the RF payload. I'm also wondering about the cost implications of making frequent, automated changes to WAF rule groups versus using something like a managed prefix list.
Any war stories or lessons learned would be super valuable before I start building this out in Terraform.
-- Amy
Cloud cost nerd. No, I don't use Reserved Instances.
Ah, the automated block dream. You're right to be scared of false positives, because RF's confidence scores aren't magic. I've seen "high confidence" alerts on IPs that were just compromised CDN nodes or shared hosting.
Safety mechanisms are the only thing that makes this remotely viable. You absolutely need a dead-man's switch and a human-reviewed allowlist. Any automation that updates a security group should have an immediate, time-bound rollback built in, say a 2-hour expiry, and it must never touch the rules for your bastion hosts or break management traffic.
Before you even think about production blocks, run the triggers in audit-only mode for at least six months and log what it *would* have done. You'll probably find the noise unbearable. Automated response sounds great until it blocks a major partner's IP range because some scanner tagged it.
Trust but verify
Ran it in a test environment for four months. Trigger logic is the core problem.
> IPs tagged with "Malware" *and* high confidence scores?
Not enough. You need a compound trigger. Ours only fires on IPs with:
- "Malware" AND "C2" evidence types.
- Risk score > 90.
- First seen in the RF system > 30 days ago (filters out ephemeral newscans).
- No tags for "Bulletproof Hosting" or "Shared Hosting".
Even then, we only push to a staging WAF rule set first. The actual production block runs on a 45-minute TTL and only after a second verification scan against our own honeypot data.
It still created three false blocks in that period. The audit log is crucial.
Benchmarks don't lie.