System tags and NOREPORT

Tags are a growing thing and are getting some serious development attention. Right now you can add multiple tags to assets, and these can be use to create custom graphs. We intend to expand tags so use can use them to customize how ShadowTrackr behaves. Needs differ. One client is happy to see all websites with a 404 or 503 response in the reports, another does not want them in the reports.

The latest addition are system tags, and this week we start with the first one: “NOREPORT”. If you tag an asset as NOREPORT ShadowTrackr will still monitor the asset and even send alerts if you have configured them, but the asset will not appear in any reports. Not even in the weekly pdf. System tags are blue and all caps. You can still add your own tags of course and these will appear in purple. In the coming weeks you’ll see more system tags appearing and in due time we also intend to support custom reports based on tags.

Stability improvements

A lot of work has been done the last few weeks, but you might not have noticed. Most time has been spent reducing complexity, which is always a good thing. Quite some code was shared between the GUI, the public website and the API. Also, test code was running from a different directory instead of from a different url, making it necessary to have some nasty config checks in the main code.

That has all changed now. The source code has been refactored and now all parts have proper separation. On top off that ShadowTrackr now uses a Continuous Integration pipeline: on every code check-in we run automated sanity checks and tests.

New domain alerts

The migration from traps to alerts is now completed, and we’ve added some new alerts for domains. You can now choose to set alerts for:

• Whois domain available
• Whois domain registered
• Whois record found
• Whois domain changed registrar
• Whois record changed
• Whois record expired
• Whois record expires next week
• Whois record expires in two weeks
• Whois record expires in three weeks

Development time in the coming period will be spent on adding more configurable alerts, expanding the use for tags, and hunting for bugs. If you see any bugs or other annoying things, please report them!