Cybersecurity Tools - RSS Readers
Some cybersecurity tools are purely technical - lists of the most common TCP and UDP ports or log parsing cheat sheets for example - and some are more generalist and useful for building up your cybersecurity knowledge. RSS Reader apps are in the generalist, knowledge building category.
So, what’s RSS and what’s an RSS Reader?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Wikipedia provides a concise summary of why RSS is super useful:
Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them.
Linking this to cybersecurity, let’s say you’re interested in or involved in endpoint protection, for example. You’ve found 20 sites that cover that topic very well, but there’s no way you can visit all of those sites every day and read the - let’s say - one to five new articles each site adds every day. Then consider you may also need to follow the latest news on vulnerabilities, malware used in attacks, and threat detection, and now there’s another 30 sites you’d really like to keep up with - and some of the sites that cover those areas may average more like 5-10 posts per day.
Long story short, there’s no way you keep up with that firehose of information if you have to visit each site. And this is where RSS readers come to the rescue.
And what do RSS readers do?
RSS readers do the aggregating and constantly monitoring for new content mentioned in the Wikipedia definition of RSS quoted above. Below is a short list of some of the common features and things you can do with RSS readers, all of which support the idea of being able to scan through your feeds quickly and efficiently. One post’s headline grabs you, you open it. Another covers something you already know about, mark it as read and move on (some apps have a setting to do this automatically as you scroll).
Follow (subscribe to) all the sites you want to keep up with; depending on your plan level with an RSS reader the number of feeds will be lower or higher - but most that I’ve seen have very generous numbers for this. It is easy to add feeds by URL, site name, and search - and it’s also easy to import and export them via OPML files (the standard file format for this) or sometimes via CSV or other file formats.
See all the new content across all the sites you follow, or by categories of sites you create, or by individual site. The screenshot at the top of this post is of All Unread posts across all the sites I follow in the Feeder RSS reader mobile app.
Choose a default view for feed items - typical options include title only, brief summary, list view, card view, and more
Mark items to read later - for posts that are definitely something you want to dive into, but don’t have time for in the moment
Filter your feeds in various ways
Create rules to automate filtering for specific keywords (for example) within feeds
Use, modify, and create dashboards to view your feeds content at a glance, like this one in the Feeder web app:
Across the columns here from left to right I have:
A CT (cyber threat) automated, rule-based feed
My starred (read it later) items
My feeds in the cyber threat intel category
All my feed categories, showing the number of unread posts in each
Like all the best things in life, RSS readers work as web apps, desktop apps, and mobile apps. And of course you can follow sites that have nothing to do with your work - sites that cover education, health, sports, gaming, or whichever other interests you follow online.
Here’s a couple more mobile RSS reader app screenshots - feed categories on the Feeder app and my insane, embarrassing unseen count on the Reader app that I have just started to see the promise in and need to stop ignoring:
If you’re interested in trying out an RSS reader there are lots of them around. I have used and can recommend Feedly, Feeder, Inoreader and Readwise Reader.