Threatfox MCP server

@pipeworx/threatfox

ThreatFox (abuse.ch) MCP — community IOC feed.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

• searchioc(indicator, exactmatch?)
• recent_iocs(days?)
• search_hash(hash) — see below, it asks TWO upstream queries
• search_malware(malware, limit?)

search_hash asks both hash relations

ThreatFox stores hashes in two unrelated places and abuse.ch's own query: "search_hash" only searches one of them:

Asking only the first made this tool 34-for-34 empty over the 30d to 2026-09-16. It was never a broken endpoint — abuse.ch answers illeglhash (their typo) for a malformed hash and noresult for a well-formed one, so our request was parsed and accepted throughout. It was the wrong question: da168c3ff95c749beec0a2f29a1e6b82, taken from this pack's own recentiocs, returns nothing from searchhash and a full row from search_ioc.

The tool now tries both and returns matchedrelation saying which answered (null when neither did, alongside searchedrelations). The second call only runs when the first found nothing, so a non-empty answer still costs one request. Do not collapse the two into one unlabelled list: "this file phones home to that C2" and "this file is itself flagged as a payload" are different security facts.

Empty is a real answer here. ThreatFox tracks C&C infrastructure, not samples — most hashes are in neither relation. Measured 2026-09-16: 7 of 40 recent MalwareBazaar sample hashes and 2 of 88 of ThreatFox's own hash IOCs resolved. For sample metadata use the malwarebazaar pack (same vendor, same key), which indexes every sample.

Committed examples go stale by design. abuse.ch expires every IOC older than six months ("IOCs older than 6 months are no longer exposed on the ThreatFox API and ThreatFox Export"), which is why abuse.ch's OWN documentation example hash 2151c4b970eff0071948dbbc19066aa4 returns no_result today — it points at IOC id 4726, from 2021. Re-verify the examples in workers/gateway/src/tool-examples.json when they age out; never commit a placeholder like d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (the MD5 of the empty string), which is what taught every caller the wrong shape.

Auth

• Platform key: gateway env PLATFORMABUSECHKEY (shared with malwarebazaar).
• BYO: ?_apiKey= after registering at https://auth.abuse.ch.

Data source

https://threatfox-api.abuse.ch/api/v1/ — header Auth-Key, POST with JSON body.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "threatfox": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/threatfox/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/threatfox/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.