# One day at the Internet Storm Center — Xavier Mertens

**URL:** <https://discourse.ossbase.org/t/one-day-at-the-internet-storm-center-xavier-mertens/636>\
**Category:** 2025 talks / workshops\
**Tags:** 2025, talk, hacklu\
**Created:** [August 26, 2025, 8:54am UTC](https://discourse.ossbase.org/t/one-day-at-the-internet-storm-center-xavier-mertens/636 "2025-08-26T08:54:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![system](https://discourse.ossbase.org/uploads/default/original/1X/4713f3d4fec85f7513775fc2dd36f548a49f8faa.jpeg) [@system](https://discourse.ossbase.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [August 26, 2025, 8:54am UTC](https://discourse.ossbase.org/t/one-day-at-the-internet-storm-center-xavier-mertens/636/1 "2025-08-26T08:54:54Z")

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**Join us at hack.lu 2025 — [Info & Registration](https://2025.hack.lu/info/)**

**Duration:** 30 min  
  
**Type:** Talk  
  
**Speakers:** Xavier Mertens

**Abstract**

Born in 2001, the Internet Storm Center (or ISC) is a volunteer-driven threat-monitoring and early-warning program that evolved out of [Incidents.org](http://Incidents.org) and the DShield consensus intrusion-log project. Leveraging a distributed network of sensors that now contributes tens of millions of firewall and IDS records each day, the ISC correlates this data to track “storms” of malicious activity, publishes a real-time Infocon threat level, and releases daily “Handler Diary” blog posts and a short Stormcast podcast to brief defenders on the latest vulnerabilities, exploits, and malware campaigns. About 40 volunteer handlers spread across several countries analyze submissions, craft tools, and coordinate community response, making the ISC one of the longest-running open sources of actionable situational awareness for incident responders and network operators worldwide. During this presentation, I’ll show you the data that we collect and make available to api, mainly through our API. I will also introduce our worldwide honeypot network (and how easily you can join it to share more data).

**Description**

The idea of this talk is to make people aware of the data we offer and how you can benefit from it in your day to day hunting tasks. How the ISC works, what are the tools we provide. And, if you’re interested, how you can apply to become a Handler! I’ll also demonstrate live (if Demo God is with me) some cool honeypot features we have.

[View on pretalx](https://pretalx.com/hack-lu-2025/talk/C9ZDAR/)

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**Author:** ![adulau](https://discourse.ossbase.org/user_avatar/discourse.ossbase.org/adulau/32/6_2.png) [@adulau](https://discourse.ossbase.org/u/adulau)\
**Post date:** [October 23, 2025, 12:06pm UTC](https://discourse.ossbase.org/t/one-day-at-the-internet-storm-center-xavier-mertens/636/2 "2025-10-23T12:06:36Z")

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Available video

[![](https://discourse.ossbase.org/uploads/default/original/1X/8c6a632fbbf8d7028aa470c6e362a3f20c91a37f.jpeg "One Day At The Internet Storm Center - Xavier Mertens") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4QXtI9nx50)