Digital Forensic Tool: IntelMQ

Reading Time: 4 Minutes

Digital Forensic Tool: IntelMQ

Github Link

Welcome to IntelMQ!

IntelMQ is a solution for IT security teams (CERTs & CSIRTs, SOCs, abuse departments, etc.) for collecting and processing security feeds (such as log files) using a message queuing protocol. It’s a community driven initiative called IHAP (Incident Handling Automation Project) which was conceptually designed by European CERTs/CSIRTs during several InfoSec events. Its main goal is to give to incident responders an easy way to collect & process threat intelligence thus improving the incident handling processes of CERTs.

Several pieces of software are evolved around IntelMQ. For an overview, look at the Ecosystem document.

IntelMQ can be used for – automated incident handling – situational awareness – automated notifications – as data collector for other tools – etc.

IntelMQ’s design was influenced by AbuseHelper however it was re-written from scratch and aims at:

Reducing the complexity of system administration
Reducing the complexity of writing new bots for new data feeds
Reducing the probability of events lost in all process with persistence functionality (even system crash)
Use and improve the existing Data Harmonization Ontology
Use JSON format for all messages
Provide easy way to store data into Log Collectors like ElasticSearch, Splunk, databases (such as PostgreSQL)
Provide easy way to create your own black-lists
Provide easy communication with other systems via HTTP RESTful API

It follows the following basic meta-guidelines:

Don’t break simplicity – KISS
Keep it open source – forever
Strive for perfection while keeping a deadline
Reduce complexity/avoid feature bloat
Embrace unit testing
Code readability: test with unexperienced programmers
Communicate clearly

How to Install

See INSTALL.

User Guide

See User Guide. Which Feeds are supported? Have a look at the Feeds documentation and the Bots documentation. If you know additional feeds and how to parse them, please contribute your code or your configuration (by issues or the mailing lists).

For support questions please use the intelmq-users mailing list: https://lists.cert.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/intelmq-users

IntelMQ use the Data Harmonization. Please read this document for more details.

IntelMQ Manager and more tools

Check out this graphical tool and easily manage an IntelMQ system.

More tools can be found in the ecosystem documentation.

How to participate

IntelMQ is a community project depending on your contributions. Please consider sharing your work.

Have a look at our Developers Guide for documentation.
Subscribe to the Intelmq-dev Mailing list to get answers to your development questions: https://lists.cert.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/intelmq-dev
The Github issues lists all the open feature requests, bug reports and ideas.
Looking for ideas which additional feeds you could add support for? The Feeds whishlist is the list you are looking for.
Contribute code with pull requests (The Github help can be useful if you are not familiar with the system yet).
Some developers are also on IRC: channel #intelmq on irc.freenode.net.