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The National Cyber Feed was a proposed Cloud Safe Task Force (CSTF) initiative, not a launched consumer product or confirmed commercial service. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle worked with U.S. government and nonprofit stakeholders on a plan to turn cloud-provider telemetry into continuously updated, actionable security intelligence for federal agencies.
As of the July 2024 reporting, CSTF participants were defining metrics, meeting weekly and discussing a pilot. No evidence in that reporting shows that a production National Cyber Feed was live.
What the National Cyber Feed is
The National Cyber Feed is the working name for a proposed public-private capability intended to give federal agencies a more current, integrated view of threats affecting cloud environments. MITRE’s July 12, 2024 record describes the effort as part of the Cloud Safe Task Force, formed in fall 2023.
The five named cloud providers were Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle. Their participation was described in the context of a joint planning effort with government and nonprofit stakeholders; it was not an announcement that those companies had opened a public threat-data service.
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The stated ambition was “to create an integrated, single national view of our nation’s security.” In practical terms, that means combining selected signals from multiple cloud environments, applying common controls and analysis, and returning intelligence that agencies can use in their existing security operations.
Why federal agencies wanted a different feed
Reporting was described as too slow
CSTF’s February 2024 assessment identified a need for a more timely threat-intelligence strategy. Dave Powner, executive director of MITRE’s Center for Data-Driven Policy, summarized the problem this way: The CSPs provide a monthly screenshot to FedRAMP.
That description contrasts periodic compliance reporting with the speed required for active defense. A monthly snapshot can document a provider’s posture, but it is not the same as a continuously refreshed picture of attacks, techniques and indicators moving across cloud services.
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MITRE cloud security capability leader Mari Spina was quoted in the July 2024 article as saying there were more than 1 million attack attempts per day. The article provides no methodology or separate measurement date for that figure, so it should be treated as her attributed estimate rather than an independently verified time series.
Agencies wanted usable intelligence, not another log dump
Federal teams were concerned that a raw stream would shift collection and analysis costs onto each agency. Dave Catanoso, the Department of Veterans Affairs director of cloud and edge application hosting, said:
“How can they feed us telemetry that would be standardized so that we can consume it with whatever tools we’re using for each of our missions, and then get it summarized by some form of AI [artificial intelligence]?”
He also warned:
“We wouldn’t want to get another feed of just large amounts of data. We want to get an intelligent feed that has useful information and is not something we have to sift through on our end because that would just increase our costs. We want to get it in a summarized way.”
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How the proposed operating model would work
The concept is a managed intelligence pipeline rather than a single database that exposes every provider’s raw event. Its intended flow can be represented as five stages:
- Collect selected telemetry. Participating providers would contribute threat-relevant signals from their cloud environments under contractual and data-handling rules.
- Protect and normalize the data. Information would be anonymized or otherwise controlled, then tagged and logged using a shared approach so that events from different providers can be compared.
- Integrate the signals. The combined data would support a cross-provider view instead of leaving each agency to reconcile incompatible feeds.
- Curate and summarize. Analysts and AI-assisted processes would turn high-volume telemetry into prioritized, actionable intelligence rather than forwarding an undigested firehose.
- Deliver it to mission systems. Agencies—and potentially participating providers—would receive outputs that can work with existing security information and event management (SIEM) and other mission tools.
The proposal depends on a common data approach. CSTF discussions identified shared tagging, logging, retention periods and explicit data-handling requirements as prerequisites.
| Design requirement | Why it matters | Question a pilot would need to answer |
|---|---|---|
| Common tagging and schemas | Lets agencies correlate events from providers that use different frameworks. | Can an analytic rule be moved between agency and provider environments without being rewritten? |
| Standard logging | Improves consistency and auditability across sources. | Which fields are mandatory, and how are missing or provider-specific fields represented? |
| Defined retention periods | Balances investigative value, storage cost and legal obligations. | How long is each data class kept, and who can extend or delete it? |
| Explicit data-handling rules | Limits disclosure, misuse and leakage risks. | What can be shared, with whom, for what purpose and under which contract? |
| Curated and summarized output | Reduces the cost of sifting through irrelevant events. | How are confidence, priority and provenance shown to analysts? |
What makes a unified feed difficult
Different provider frameworks and tools
Cloud providers do not expose security information in identical formats. Major Julian Petty, a U.S. Army Cyber Command cyber warfare officer, described the interoperability problem:
“How do I take the analytics that were developed with this particular SIEM [security information and event management] in mind but translate it over to a completely different instance that I’m using?”
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A national feed would therefore need portable data definitions and analytics, not merely a new destination for existing logs.
Sharing can create security and business risks
Provider telemetry may contain sensitive customer, operational or infrastructure details. The CSTF discussion highlighted competitive, compliance and leakage concerns, so participation cannot be assumed to mean unrestricted sharing of all cloud data.
John Bergin, Microsoft’s director of federal digital security and risk, framed the governance issue this way:
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“We have structures, contractual agreements, executive orders to hand that data over — the question is, how do we do more and think differently about our role in threat hunting?”
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He also questioned whether the existing reporting baseline was enough for active hunters:
“I don’t believe, personally, that the FedRAMP data set is sufficient or meaningful to the hunters. But I think the question we’ve got to get to is, how do we add and extend and then use that FedRAMP framework of contractually required data to the government with explicit data-handling requirements?”
FedRAMP is therefore best understood here as a contractual and reporting baseline, not as the National Cyber Feed itself.
Summarization must remain accountable
AI summarization could make a high-volume feed usable, but agencies would still need source visibility, confidence indicators, retention controls and a way to challenge or investigate an automated conclusion. Otherwise, compression could hide uncertainty or remove details needed for incident response.
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MITRE’s Mari Spina argued that monitoring should not stop at passive observation:
“I’m pushing for continuous monitoring to include continuous testing.”
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Her point is that a feed should help agencies test whether defenses detect and withstand changing techniques, not simply report yesterday’s events. She added:
“Predictive models, predictive threat models, are going to play a much greater role in any kind of adversary emulation.”
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The July 2024 discussion cited MITRE models including FiGHT for 5G, ATLAS for AI and CAVEaT for Cloud as examples of frameworks that could support this forward-looking approach. A mature implementation would connect telemetry to testing and adversary emulation while clearly separating observed evidence from predictions.
What had happened by July 2024
| Time | Reported development |
|---|---|
| Fall 2023 | The Cloud Safe Task Force was formed. |
| February 2024 | CSTF identified the need for a more timely threat-intelligence strategy. |
| July 2024 | Stakeholders had defined proposed metrics, were meeting weekly and were discussing an eventual pilot. |
The available account does not establish that the pilot started or that a production National Cyber Feed launched after those planning discussions. Powner nevertheless described the collaboration positively: I love the momentum that we’re getting with this because I think both sides see a win-win.
What the National Cyber Feed is not
- Not a consumer product: It was aimed at federal security operations, not individual cloud customers.
- Not a confirmed commercial service: The named companies were participants in a proposed public-private effort, not vendors announcing a generally available subscription.
- Not the same as FedRAMP: FedRAMP reporting was discussed as a baseline that might be extended with richer, explicitly governed data.
- Not proven to be live: July 2024 reporting described planning, metrics and a possible pilot, not operational deployment.
- Not unrestricted data pooling: Contracts, anonymization, retention and leakage controls would determine what could actually be shared.
How to judge a future implementation
If CSTF or a successor turns the proposal into an operational service, the meaningful tests will be practical rather than promotional:
- Reporting latency: Does intelligence arrive quickly enough to support active defense?
- Provider breadth: Are all five named providers covered, and are important federal dependencies missing?
- Interoperability: Can agencies use the output in their existing SIEM and mission tools?
- Data protection: Are anonymization, access, retention and leakage controls explicit and auditable?
- Curation quality: Does summarization reduce workload without concealing evidence or uncertainty?
- Continuous testing: Does the service support validation and predictive adversary modeling, not only observation?
- Governance: Who sets standards, investigates errors, measures performance and accepts responsibility?
- Deployment evidence: Are there published pilot results, operating metrics and agency users rather than only planning statements?
Bottom line
The National Cyber Feed was an ambitious July 2024 proposal to replace slow, fragmented cloud-security reporting with standardized, curated and continuously updated intelligence for federal agencies. Its significance lies in the operating model—shared telemetry, common controls, usable summaries and continuous testing—not in a confirmed live product. Until a pilot or production service is documented, it should be described as a planned initiative rather than an established national feed.
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