Indian SOCs are drowning in IOC feeds — and missing the actor. A 50,000-IOC feed of expired SHA-256s and parked C2 domains feels productive but catches nothing. This whitepaper documents the IOC extraction methodology Macksofy DFIR runs on every malware engagement, organised by the David Bianco Pyramid of Pain and tuned for the operational realities of an Indian SOC.

1. The Pyramid of Pain — why it still matters

Atomic IOCs (hashes, IPs, domains) are cheap for an attacker to change. Computed IOCs (Imphash, ssdeep, behavioural patterns) are harder. TTPs are the most expensive. A SOC that only ingests atomic IOCs is fighting yesterday's campaign; a SOC that hunts TTPs is fighting the actor.

<24h

median lifespan of a typical malware C2 domain

~6 weeks

average malware-family Imphash stability

months

TTP stability for established threat actors

2. Atomic IOCs — extract them, but don't stop there

MD5 / SHA-1 / SHA-256 — capture all three for compatibility with feeds and EDRs
Domain + URL paths — full URL, not just the apex domain
IPv4 / IPv6 — both, with ASN annotation for cluster correlation
Email indicators — sender, X-Originating-IP, SPF/DKIM/DMARC status
Filenames + paths — when distinctive (avoid `update.exe`, capture `c:\users\public\winhost_v2.exe`)
Registry keys + persistence paths

3. Computed IOCs — the real value layer

IOC type	How to compute	Why it survives variants
Imphash	pefile.PE(f).get_imphash()	PE import table changes slowly across variants
TLSH	tlsh.hash(open(f,'rb').read())	Locality-sensitive hash; catches near-duplicates
ssdeep	ssdeep --compare	Fuzzy hash for chunk-level similarity
YARA cluster ID	From your YARA rule's family tag	Pattern-match across the malware family
Behavioural pattern	From sandbox (e.g., Cuckoo, ANY.RUN) signatures	Same family acts the same way under detonation

4. Behavioural IOCs — TTPs you can actually hunt

TTPs are MITRE ATT&CK techniques the malware exhibits. They survive every cosmetic change to the binary. A SOC that hunts T1566.001 (spearphishing attachment), T1204 (user execution), T1059.001 (PowerShell), T1071.001 (web protocol C2) for malware-family X catches the same family even when the binary changes weekly.

Encode each malware family as a MITRE ATT&CK technique-set
Convert techniques into Sigma rules for SIEM hunting
Convert Sigma into your specific SIEM dialect (Splunk SPL / KQL / ESQL / etc.)
Tune for false-positive rate against a known-good corpus before promotion to production

5. The IOC lifecycle — preventing stale-feed fatigue

Every IOC has a publication-date and an expiry-date in metadata
Atomic IOC default expiry: 30 days (parked / sinkholed quickly)
Computed IOC expiry: 180 days
Behavioural / Sigma IOC expiry: revisit annually
Reputation re-check at expiry — promote, demote or delete
Track false-positive rate per IOC source; demote noisy sources

6. Tooling stack (open + commercial)

MISP — IOC sharing platform; native event model + STIX export
OpenCTI — threat-intel platform with knowledge-graph view
TheHive + Cortex — case management with IOC enrichment connectors
VirusTotal — multi-engine atomic-IOC reputation
URLhaus / abuse.ch — community feeds for malware C2
Macksofy IOC pack — India-context curated feed (BFSI / fintech-targeting families)

India-context advantage.

Many global IOC feeds under-cover Indian-targeting malware — banking trojans pivoted to UPI fraud, fake-RBI lure infrastructure, GSTN-themed phishing kits. Macksofy's IOC feed is sourced from Indian customer engagements and is calibrated to what hits Indian SOCs first.

Engage Macksofy

Need this in production, not on paper?

Macksofy offers full-service engagements that map directly to this resource. Common starting points:

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