This article was updated on December 22nd, 2025.
Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) are signs of malicious activity within an organization’s environment. An IoC feed compiles and shares this threat intelligence in a structured format so that security teams can threat hunt, block malicious connections, and triage alerts more effectively.
See How Flare Contextualizes IoC Feeds with Stealer Log Intelligence
Stop chasing alerts without context. Flare automatically correlates IoC feeds with stealer logs, breach data, and dark web intelligence—giving you the complete attack narrative you need to respond faster and smarter.
IoC Feed: A Brief Overview
What are IoCs?
Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) are evidence or clues that suggest a potential security incident may be occurring or have occurred. These indicators can be anything from IP addresses and domain names to URLs and file hashes. By identifying IoCs, security teams can better understand how a network has been compromised.
Some examples of IoCs include:
- Specific URLs, IP addresses, or domains flagged as suspicious because they’re linked to attacks
- File hashes linked to viruses and breach attempts
IoCs are artifacts that reveal a network has been breached, making them different from indicators of attack (IoAs) which focus on a malicious actor’s behavior to highlight the tactics and techniques used.
What are IoC feeds?
IoC feeds are streams of data that help cybersecurity teams identify potential threats in real-time. Security teams often incorporate IoC feeds as part of their threat intelligence gathering because the feeds offer actionable insights about potential threats and ongoing malicious activities.
What are STIX and TAXII?
To integrate IoC feeds into security tools, the data provided needs to be machine readable.
STIX, or Structured Threat Information Expression, is a language designed for describing cybersecurity threats in a machine-readable format. This open source framework provides consistency when sharing threat information so that security teams can easily integrate the data into their security tools. Many IoC feeds adopt STIX so that threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) can be interpreted across different platforms.
TAXII, or Trusted Automated eXchange of Intelligence Information, is a protocol built specifically for transmitting STIX formatted threat intelligence. Organizations using TAXII need not maintain their own TAXII infrastructure; they can simply accept STIX feeds from an external server.
STIX
STIX is an open standard for describing cybersecurity threats in a machine-readable format. This framework provides consistency when sharing threat information, enabling security teams to easily integrate data into their security tools and interpret threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) across different platforms.
The machine-readable format allows for automated ingestion and processing of threat intelligence, eliminating manual data entry and reducing time to action. Security teams can leverage STIX to:
- Share threat intelligence seamlessly across different security platforms
- Automate threat detection and response workflows
- Maintain consistent interpretation of threat data organization-wide
TAXII
TAXII is a protocol built specifically for transmitting STIX-formatted threat intelligence. It defines how cyber threat information can be shared over HTTPS in a standardized, automated way.
Organizations using TAXII can consume threat intelligence feeds from external servers without maintaining their own TAXII infrastructure. This eliminates the operational overhead of running feed servers while still benefiting from automated, real-time threat intelligence delivery to SIEMs, firewalls, and other security tools.
- Secure transmission of STIX-formatted intelligence over HTTPS
- No server infrastructure required for consuming feeds
- Automated delivery to existing security tool integrations
Why are IoC Feeds Important in Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape?
What are the Benefits of IoC Feeds?
IoC feeds enable security teams to identify and respond to threats by continuously comparing network activity, file hashes, and system interactions against known malicious indicators. This automated threat detection provides several critical advantages:
- Faster Threat Identification: Instantly flag suspicious activity when logs reveal connections to known malicious IPs, domains, or file hashes—reducing detection time from hours to seconds.
- Proactive Defense: Block threats before they infiltrate your environment by integrating IoC feeds directly into firewalls, EDR platforms, and SIEMs for automated prevention.
- Contextual Intelligence: Understand not just what is malicious, but why—connecting detected IoCs to specific threat actors, campaigns, and attack techniques (TTPs) for informed response decisions.
- Reduced Alert Fatigue: Automatically filter and prioritize alerts by cross-referencing against verified threat intelligence, helping analysts focus on genuine threats rather than false positives.
By continuously enriching security tools with up-to-date IoC feeds, organizations transform reactive incident response into proactive threat prevention.
Why are More IoC Feeds Better than Solitary Feeds?
Relying on a single IoC feed creates dangerous blind spots. Threat actors operate across multiple attack vectors—phishing campaigns, malware distribution networks, command-and-control infrastructure, and credential theft operations—each requiring specialized intelligence sources to detect effectively.
Organizations that aggregate multiple IoC feeds gain strategic advantages:
- Complementary Intelligence Coverage: Commercial feeds like Recorded Future excel at breadth, open-source feeds like AlienVault OTX provide community-driven indicators, and specialized feeds focus on specific threat types (ransomware TTPs, infostealer logs, phishing infrastructure). Each source fills gaps the others miss.
- Reduced False Negatives: A single feed may not catalog a newly-registered malicious domain or an emerging malware hash. Multi-feed integration ensures that if one source misses an indicator, another likely catches it—critical when detecting zero-day exploits or novel attack infrastructure.
- Cross-Validation and Confidence Scoring: When the same malicious IP appears in three independent feeds, confidence increases dramatically. Security teams can implement tiered response workflows: auto-block indicators confirmed by multiple sources, while single-source hits trigger investigation rather than immediate action.
- Threat-Specific Customization: Financial institutions might prioritize banking trojan feeds and credential compromise data, while healthcare organizations focus on ransomware indicators and medical device vulnerabilities. Multi-feed strategies allow teams to weight sources based on their specific risk profile.
- Resilience Against Feed Outages: If a primary commercial feed experiences downtime or API issues, redundant sources ensure continuous threat detection. Mission-critical environments cannot afford gaps in threat intelligence coverage.
The result: security teams detect threats faster, respond with higher confidence, and maintain defense continuity even when individual intelligence sources fail.
What are Some IoC feed Best Practices?
IoC Feed Best Practices
Implementing IoC feeds effectively requires a strategic approach beyond simply enabling data ingestion. Security teams should follow these best practices:
Implement at least 3-5 complementary feeds covering different intelligence domains—commercial threat intelligence (Recorded Future, Mandiant), open-source feeds (MISP, AlienVault OTX), industry-specific ISACs, and specialized sources (infostealer logs, phishing infrastructure). This redundancy prevents single-source blind spots and enables cross-validation.
Before committing to a feed, evaluate it against measurable criteria: false positive rate (target <5% for production environments), indicator freshness (how quickly new threats appear), geographic and threat-type coverage relevant to your organization, attribution quality (does it provide TTPs and threat actor context?), and API reliability/uptime SLAs.
Request trial periods to validate feeds against known historical incidents in your environment.
Configure your threat intelligence platform (TIP) or SIEM to assign confidence scores based on how many independent sources report the same indicator. For example: indicators appearing in 3+ feeds trigger automatic blocking, 2 feeds generate high-priority alerts for analyst review, and single-source indicators create low-priority watchlist entries.
Select feeds that support STIX/TAXII protocols for automated ingestion into your security stack. Ensure IoC feeds integrate with your SIEM (Splunk, Sentinel, Chronicle), firewall policies, EDR platforms (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne), and email security gateways. Manual CSV uploads are unsustainable—automation is critical for real-time threat prevention.
IoC feeds degrade over time as indicators age. Implement automatic expiration policies (e.g., remove IP-based IoCs older than 90 days, domain IoCs older than 180 days) and regularly audit feed performance. Remove feeds generating excessive false positives or providing stale intelligence that no longer reflects active threats.
Validate your IoC feed implementation by checking if it detects known historical compromises in your environment. Run indicators from past incidents through your current feeds—if they don’t appear, your coverage has gaps.
What You Get with Flare’s IoC Feeds
How Does Flare Complement IoC Feed Needs?
Flare’s Threat Flow provides timely, relevant, and trustworthy dark web intelligence related to IoC feed technical information. For example, with Flare, security teams can summarize attackers’ dark web conversations relating to known vulnerabilities or malware signatures to gain insights around geographic region or industry targeting. With this information, security teams can create specific detections or review their environment more precisely, saving time and improving their security posture.
We have also partnered with Sekoia to deliver IoC feeds to our customers as part of a holistic threat intelligence program.
How Does Flare Augment IoC Feeds?
Flare provides high-quality structured data from thousands of sources so that security teams have unified coverage focusing on external risks. With Flare, security teams have automated event contextualization that enables them to create more efficient workflows and stay ahead of threats.
The Power of Contextualized IoC Intelligence
Flare provides high-quality structured data from thousands of sources, enabling security teams to have unified coverage focused on external risks. With automated event contextualization from stealer logs, teams create more efficient workflows and stay ahead of threats.
Analyst must manually investigate with no context about the threat source or severity
- Corporate VPN credentials (last used: 2 days ago)
- AWS console session cookies (still valid)
- Saved Okta SSO password
- Slack authentication tokens
- Browser history revealing internal URLs
- Employee device infected via malicious PDF
- Infostealer: RedLine v2.1
- Data exfiltrated: December 15, 2025
- Other accounts exposed: Gmail, LinkedIn, GitHub
What are the Key Benefits of Using Flare with IoC Feeds?
Flare enhances IoC feed value by:
- Enriching data: Visibility into the organization’s external attack surface across broad sources
- Leveraging artificial intelligence: AI-driven system with sophisticated analysis and transparent data collection to prioritize relevant alerts and actions
- Offering customization: Ability to customize and prioritize sources based on the team’s application or technology needs.
IoC Feeds and Flare
The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Flare’s platform enables security teams to augment their IoC feeds with context from over 50,000 cybercrime communities, 70 million stealer logs, and 2 million threat actor profiles to gain targeted insights about security threats facing their organization.
Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. Learn more by signing up for our free trial.
