urlscan.io Blog

If you’re not sick of hearing it yet: Here’s to a happy new year from all of us at urlscan.io!

We wanted to take the opportunity to revisit major changes that launched in 2022 and to give you a glimpse of our 2023 roadmap at the same time. Some of the things we have worked on in 2022 represent the foundation for new products due to launch over the next quarters.

May 2022: Visual Search

In May of 2022 we announced the cutting-edge Visual Search feature within urlscan Pro. By itself, this feature allows customers to hunt for scans of websites using only the visual appearance of their screenshot. urlscan itself uses the visual similarity of a website to improve our brand and phishing detection. The fact that we are able to offer this feature at our scale and with a meaningful accuracy means that we and our customers are now able to detect and attribute phishing pages using Visual Similarity instead of only relying on threshold or rule-based approaches which work on text or HTTP content of websites.

July 2022: Saved Searches & Subscriptions

In July we launched a frequently-requested feature in the form of Saved Searches & Email Subscriptions. This feature lets customers bookmark interesting hunt searches from within the urlscan Pro UI. Furthermore, customers are now able to subscribe to email alerts whenever there are new hits for their searches.

November 2022: Newly Observed Hostnames & Domains

In November of last year we launched the real-time Newly Observed Hostnames & Domains datasource in urlscan Pro. As we said back then, this new feed of data means a great deal for both urlscan and our customers as it will enable multiple use-cases going forward. Previously we had to rely on someone submitting a URL to urlscan.io in order for us to know about the URL and its hostname. Now, we ingest millions of hostnames and domains every day from a variety of sources, and we can observe hostnames long before they are starting to host website content.

Access to the data is available through urlscan Pro, and our customers are already using it to identify potentially malicious domains and hostnames (e.g. typosquatting) but also to look at their own infrastructure, for example via subdomain enumeration.

Launching in 2023: urlscan Observe

For the next year, the big theme for us will be combining the building blocks we already have into a more powerful and more convenient hands-off pipeline. A big recurring ask from our customers is a set-and-forget system that lets them enter keywords and search expressions and hand off the responsibility for monitoring any hits to urlscan.

That’s why, starting in Q2 of 2023, we will be offering a new module called urlscan Observe. urlscan Observe will be our hands-off monitoring system for new domains, hostnames, and URLs. It will perform the onerous job of watching for changes to interesting things (like domains and URLs) over time. The end result for customers is a concise timeline of changes to the thing being monitored along with frequent alerts.

In a nut-shell, urlscan Observe will support:

• Customer-supplied keywords and search patterns to match against the newly observed domains & hostnames feed
• Sending customers alerts about new hits for these keywords
• Automatically monitoring for changes related to these hits
• Alerting customers about infrastructure changes to these hits: DNS records, new subdomains, active HTTP servers, website content, etc.
• Letting customers manually specify domains and URLs to watch

New Subscription Options

For 2023 we have also overhauled our plans & pricing. Going forward we have one subscription aimed at customers that are only looking for an automation capability, and we have three subscription levels for customers that also want to leverage our powerful urlscan Pro - Threat Hunting platform. We continue to work with various resellers across the globe to facilitate fast and painless procurement processes.

Talk to us!

If you’re interested to learn about our current and upcoming capabilities and how these might help you automate and reduce your workload, talk to us. For all of our plans and features we offer a free 30-day trial with no strings attached. We’d be happy to give you a passionate demo of what our platform can do for you. Reach out to us at sales@urlscan.io.