The alert hit at 2:17 AM: UNKNOWN MALWARE EXFILTRATING PAYROLL DATA. Our $500k/year commercial threat feed showed nothing. But my homemade intelligence system flagged it instantly—because I'd seen the same attacker fingerprint target our industry forum three days prior. While the SOC scrambled, my Python scrapers had already delivered the kill shot.

After losing $240k to a supply chain attack, I rejected bloated commercial feeds. They missed:

• Our niche manufacturing industry threats
• Regional hacker forum chatter
• Early-warning signals from peer companies

I built a threat intelligence factory from:

# Core components
sources = [
    "Russian carding forums", 
    "GitHub commit exploits",
    "Dark web API leaks",
    "Competitor breach reports"
]
tools = ["Scrapy", "ELK Stack", "MISP", "YARA"]

Layer 1: Collection Engines