Hacker News: Full Text, Full Archive RSS Feeds for Any Blog

Source URL: https://www.dogesec.com/blog/full_text_rss_atom_blog_feeds/
Source: Hacker News
Title: Full Text, Full Archive RSS Feeds for Any Blog

Feedly Summary: Comments

AI Summary and Description: Yes

**Summary:** The text addresses issues with RSS and ATOM feeds in cyber threat intelligence, emphasizing the limitations of post history and content accessibility. It discusses the development of an open-source tool, history4feed, which seeks to remedy these challenges by enabling the collection and full-text archiving of blog content related to cybersecurity. This topic is relevant for professionals aiming to enhance their threat intelligence research capabilities.

**Detailed Description:**
The content provides a comprehensive view on the problems associated with RSS and ATOM feeds used for tracking cyber threat intelligence research. Here are the significant points discussed:

– **Problems with Current Feeds:**
– **Limited History**: Most feeds retain a short history (approx. 10-20 posts), making it difficult for researchers to access older posts related to new vulnerabilities or malware.
– **Partial Content**: Feeds typically show only summaries of articles, compelling users to visit the linked pages for the full content. This presents an inconvenience in terms of time and effort.

– **CVE-2024-3094 Example**: The author uses the case of CVE-2024-3094 to demonstrate the need for historical research, as malicious actors often utilize prior tactics that are pivotal for understanding current threats.

– **Proposed Solutions:**
– **Web Scraping**: One approach mentioned is scraping blogs for historical content, though it can be technically complex and time-consuming.
– **Wayback Machine Archive**: The use of the Wayback Machine to retrieve archived feed snapshots is also suggested, which has shown to be effective in specific cases.

– **Introduction of history4feed**: To tackle these limitations, the author presents a command-line tool named history4feed. Key features include:
– The ability to download and store historical posts in full text from an RSS or ATOM feed, effectively creating a complete archive.
– Support for extracting content while eliminating noisy HTML components using libraries like `readability-lxml`.
– Interaction through a Swagger UI API for ease of use.

– **Utility in Cyber Threat Intelligence**:
– The author highlights integration of automated processes to convert blog posts into STIX objects for use with security tools, thus streamlining the threat intelligence lifecycle.
– For researchers, this tool facilitates effective monitoring and studying of historical and current cyber threat landscapes, aligning well with MLOps tasks and DevSecOps practices.

Overall, this text not only identifies critical gaps in the handling of cyber threat intelligence feeds but also introduces a novel solution that enhances research capabilities for security professionals, ultimately improving their ability to anticipate and respond to cyber threats efficiently.