Skip to content

Indicators

Mechanics live on the Indicators system page.

Where it comes from

An indicator is a wanted poster. It does not reason about behaviour; it is a specific, named observable - a face, a plate number, a fingerprint - that someone with authority has put on a list. The indicator family matches those specific observables rather than shapes: a known-bad host, a known campaign's literal, a specific metadata endpoint. These are the atomic facts that the collective correlation rules (G-series) aggregate, and the ones a maintainer can override when a stated use is legitimate.

A wanted poster needs a signature and a date for the same reason. Indicators age: a host that was malicious last year may be a recycled CDN today, so indicator findings carry provenance and date, and the override-tolerance logic exists to let a known-good explanation suppress one without suppressing the class.

What a finding means

  • The finding is a concrete match, with the matched observable and its provenance (which corpus or campaign it came from).
  • An indicator match is strong evidence of the specific past activity; it is not proof the current diff is malicious, because observables are reused.
  • An indicator suppression must be terminal-visible: when a reviewer overrides one, the report still shows what was suppressed and why, so a stale override cannot hide a re-appearance.

See also