Introduction
With the festive season upon us, our Hexmas elves have been busy working on new features, merrily improving the system, and have readied a few treats for our ASM users to unwrap early:
- A new credit-based system to manage scan allowances
- Added annotations for notable events on the scan timeline charts
- Improved identification of seed web presence, with click-through
Scan credits
We’ve made some behind-the-scenes changes to how we manage scan allowances and automate monthly allocations. These, like rescan allowances, are now credits-based. This change won’t impact how ASM is used, or change any existing allowances, but users may notice a few subtle UI differences on the usage page and around the app.
Ultimately this will allow us to provide a better service now, and in the future, and support our roadmap of new features.
Scan events shown on risk charts
We often get asked, for scans monitored over time, why there is sometimes a jump in the number of results or risks at specific points in time. This is usually because we have either added a new detection capability to ASM, or the user of the scan has added some additional seed domains or IP addresses.
To assist with telling the story of how a scan has progressed over time, we have added annotations to highlight change events on an ASM scan’s risks over time chart.
These annotations are clickable, and will display the reason for the given annotation and step in results, along with a link to a relevant article if it is a capability change we have introduced. For example here, our recent addition of a new check for certificates with an expiry longer than 90 days is highlighted and helps explain the uplift in risks discovered from this date.
The risks over time chart on the Risks page also shows annotations too.
The addition of seed domains and IP addresses is also highlighted too, as these represent an increase in the scope of the scan, and therefore the number of results discovered.
Web presence overview improvements
The web presence images on the Overview page shows the web pages of seed domains. There are some instances we’ve identified where there might not be any web presence directly associated with a seed domain. This might be due to the lack of a specific www. subdomain redirection, or anything directly hosted on the top-level domain.
For a viewer of a scan, this might mean that no visual screenshot is shown for a given seed domain, despite when attempting to navigate to it in their browser, it appears to resolve a website.
This is because web browsers will often fallback to automatically resolving the www. subdomain, even when a redirection is not defined on the top-level domain.
To better represent a website end-user’s experience, we have altered how the Web Presence overview card identifies the most relevant screenshot to show for a given seed domain. This means you may now see an image where you didn’t previously and covers the scenario above.
In addition to this, to further improve usability, these screenshots are now clickable and have a new link icon in the seed heading, which will take you to a filtered view of the Web Presence page. This navigation allows you to explore a seed’s web presence further.
Focus on smaller tasks
In our most recent engineering sprint, we trialled a new approach to target our backlog of smaller tasks. This involved spending a focused period of time as a whole team working exclusively on smaller tasks, and specifically those that have been on the backlog the longest. This worked out a success, allowing us to quickly decrease our backlog of smaller tasks by 45%, and is an approach we will periodically use in future. As an end user this should provide a range of subtle benefits to your experience using ASM.
Coming soon
- Updated IP address data handling and protocol risks
- Improving the client onboarding experience for MSPs
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