How to find the list of IP, URL, and DNS entries in the Cisco Firepower Feed

Customers and students always ask me how to see what is in the  Firepower objects updated by the Cisco feed, so this blog will show you how to find this information.

Security Intelligence is an object category that contains three different types of objects.  These are:

  1. Network
  2. DNS
  3. URL

You can find and manage all the feeds in the Objects page:

The Objects are implemented in the Access Control Policy under the Security Intelligence tab:

Finding the IP addresses in the for the Network Lists and Feeds objects

Nicely, this one is pretty easy. Go to Talosintelligence.com and click on Reputation Center and then IP Blacklist Download

The huge list of IP’s in the Network objects will appear. Now press CNTL-A and then CNTL-C.

Open Notepad on your desktop and then press CNTL-V and the list will populate into your Notepad; save the file.

Now you can just use those IP’s to test your SI lists by pasting these IP’s into a browser from an inside host.

Finding the URL and DNS addresses in the URL and DNS Lists and Feeds objects

Inside the ACP Security Intelligence tab, you can hover over one of the Network, DNS or URL categories.  A pop up will indicate how many entries are currently in this category.

That’s great, but what about the actual entries in each of these objects?

To find these you must SSH to either a FTD device or the FMC.  You will find the three types of security intelligence entries in the following three locations:

  • Network/var/sf/iprep_download
  • DNS/var/sf/sidns_download
  • URL/var/sf/siurl_download

Here you will find separate text files for each security intelligence category.  You will also find text files for any of your custom feeds as well.

Here is an example of finding the DNS feed file by using: cd /var/sf/sidns_download and then listing the files using ls

The files have unrecognizable UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier) names but if you use cathead or tail to look at their contents you will see they are simply text files.  Each one contains the name of the list as a comment in the first line.

Using this technique you can find out the contents of any of the security intelligence download files for each of the three categories.  One huge caveat however, these files are updated frequently.  Depending on the update frequency you have selected, an entry that was here 5 minutes ago may be gone now.  If you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue or predict whether a given IP, domain or URL will be blocked this may not be a viable technique.

 

16 Comments

  1. How can I tell what url the default feeds are using as I am unable to see any objects in the SI tab (both network and url) in an ACP.

    I am behind a proxy and they have allowed access to intelligence.sourcefire.com but are seeing no hits even though i have frequency changed to 30mins. However they have denies from my FMCv to feeds.feedburner.com not sure what this is.

    Thanks

  2. do you have a device in the FMC? The objects don’t show up until you have a device registered with the FMC
    if so, then you don’t have internet access to the FMC
    feeds.feedburner is not cisco, it is something else that someone set up statically there

  3. Thanks Todd,

    I have a device registered to the FMCv and a simple ACP associated but the device is not licensed yet, waiting for the customer to sort the licensing out.

    That feeds.feedburner is strange one because this is a new installation on an ESX box so it’s got the default feeds.

    Will wait for license and then hopefully the objects will show up.

    Thanks,

  4. I am using FMC with no internet connection. There is Global Blacklist for URL and Global Blacklist for DNS are configured under the policy. How do I prove that it’s block the DNS or URL from a non internet computer. I tried nslookup and ping but that did not generate any event under Analysis. Can you please help?

    1. you can go to Talos and pull down the IP blackist, then you just use one of those IP’s on your internal computer and it will block it when it gets to the FTD device

  5. hi todd, i know the fmc download the list from the web url’s , but do we need to do a deploy to push the configs to the FTD’s? or everytime there’s an update on the feeds it also automatically updates the FTD’s list? thanks for all the help

    1. by default the list is downloaded to the FMC and pushed to the FTD’s every two hours. You can change that to a lower time frame in the Objects.
      If you add your own list to the SI then you need to deploy, the cisco objects are pushed after a download by default, so no worries!
      Todd

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