SRB CERT Has No RSS Feed, So I Made One

2026-06-24 · infosec rss python srbcert tools scraping

If you work in infosec in Serbia, you probably know SRB CERT — the national Computer Emergency Response Team. They publish security advisories, incident reports, and notifications on their site. Good stuff, worth following.

The problem: no RSS feed. No Atom feed. Nothing. You either remember to check the site manually, or you miss things.

I got tired of that, so I built feedbot.

What it does

Feedbot is a small Python scraper that fetches the SRB CERT notifications page, pulls out each advisory (title, date, link), and generates a proper RSS XML file from it. That file gets served as a static asset, so anything that understands RSS — your feed reader, your Slack RSS bot, whatever — can consume it.

The core stack is minimal:

• requests + BeautifulSoup4 for fetching and parsing the HTML
• rfeed for building the RSS XML
• A sources.json config that maps CSS selectors to feed fields
• A shell script and a cron job that ties it all together

The config for SRB CERT looks roughly like this — you point it at the page, tell it which HTML elements contain the title, date, and link, give it a regex for parsing Serbian month names, and that’s it:

{
  "id": "srbcert",
  "name": "SRB CERT Obaveštenja",
  "language": "sr",
  "page": "https://www.cert.rs/rs/obavestenja.html",
  "base_url": "https://www.cert.rs/rs/",
  "locators": {
    "item": { "tag": "div", "class": "preporuka" },
    "title": { "tag": "h3",   "class": "title" },
    "date":  { "tag": "span", "class": "date" },
    "link":  { "tag": "a",    "class": "date", "attr": "href" }
  }
}

How it runs

A cron job calls the update script on a schedule. The script runs feedbot, which writes fresh XML files to a directory served by nginx. The feed is live at ristic.in.rs/rss/srb_cert.xml if you want to subscribe without running anything yourself.

Why bother?

Partly because I wanted the feed for myself. Partly because it felt wrong that a national CERT — an organization whose job is to help people stay on top of security threats — doesn’t offer a machine-readable way to follow their own alerts.

An RSS feed is a solved problem from 2001. It takes almost no effort to publish one. The fact that you have to scrape a government security site to get this basic functionality in 2024 is a mild indictment of how seriously some institutions take their own communication.

It’s generic

Feedbot isn’t SRB CERT-specific. The sources.json approach means you can point it at any site that has a consistent HTML structure. If there’s another site you want a feed for — add a source config, run the script, done.

The repo is at github.com/aleksandarristic/feedbot. PRs welcome, especially for more source configurations.