Member Spotlight

Building the infrastructure of trust — one open-source contribution at a time

Koen Van Impe is one of those community figures whose impact is greater than the sum of its visible parts. With over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, Koen works as a freelancer specializing in threat intelligence, incident response and security operations, and is part of the core team behind the MISP project, the world's most widely used open-source platform for structured threat intelligence sharing. His profile as a FIRST member reflects a consistent track record of contribution to the global community of CSIRTs and response teams.

From intelligence to action

Koen's work is driven by a practical conviction: threat intelligence only has value when it leads to action. Much of what he builds is designed to close the gap between information being available and organizations actually being able to use it, reducing complexity, automating repetitive tasks, and ensuring that curated intelligence reaches the detection and response tools that teams rely on every day.

Enabling organizations to collaborate with confidence

Koen understands that sharing information is only possible when organizations have the right foundations in place. He invests significantly in guidance and documentation that helps teams, especially those building their capabilities for the first time, make sound architectural and operational decisions. His playbooks and workflow tools bring structure and repeatability to analytical processes that are often handled inconsistently across the community, raising the collective baseline.

Protecting critical infrastructure through open community efforts

Through ICS-CSIRT.io, Koen maintains an independent, non-commercial initiative focused on sharing security information for Industrial Control Systems. In a domain where the consequences of incidents extend beyond data loss into physical safety, this kind of open and trusted channel fills a gap that neither governments nor vendors have fully addressed.

A community-first approach

What distinguishes Koen's contributions is not any single tool or publication, but a sustained and deliberate effort to make the broader ecosystem more capable and more connected. His work is open, practical and oriented toward impact, ensuring that organizations with fewer resources can participate in and benefit from the same intelligence-sharing networks as the most advanced teams. That is the kind of contribution that makes the FIRST community stronger.

Published on FIRST POST: Jan-Mar 2026