Welcome back to this series on using MISP for threat intelligence!

MISP (Malware Information Sharing Platform and Threat Sharing) is an open-source threat intelligence platform that allows you to share, collate, analyze, and distribute threat intelligence. It is used across industries and governments worldwide to share and analyze information about the latest threats. This series aims to give you the knowledge you need to get up and running with MISP as quickly as possible.

If you have followed this series, you will now have events and attributes (IOCs) in your MISP instance and know how to search through them. However, this can be clunky using the MISP web interface. Thankfully, MISP exposes an API we can use to perform any action we can do in the web interface in code!

Today, you learn to use this API to make the most of your MISP instance. You will see how to get statistics about your MISP instance, search for attributes and events, and visualize data you’ve added to your instance.

Let’s jump in and start using the API!

Before looking at MISP’s API, let’s have a quick refresher on what an API is and what it is used for.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of protocols, routines, and tools for building software applications. It defines a set of rules that allow software applications to interact with each other to exchange data and services. They are a bridge between two applications that allows them to communicate with each other in a standard way.

APIs allow developers to access specific functionality or data from a service or application without requiring access to the underlying code. This makes it possible to integrate different software applications, databases, and services and build new applications on top of existing ones.

The most common APIs you are likely to interact with are web APIs, which allow you to interact with a web-based application in a programmable manner. APIs can be public (which anyone can use) or private (which are only accessible by authorized parties). Again, most of the time, you will use APIs requiring some form of authorization (username and password, token…