urlscan.io Blog

Today we are launching major improvements to our scanning engine and new scanning capabilities for our customers.

Live Browsing — Interact with websites

Our scanner has always been using the Google Chrome web-browser as the basis for its website analysis. Using Chrome allows the scanner to open and view websites exactly like a human user would. However, there are scenarios where additional human input is needed to access a website, such as dialogues or captchas.

With our new Live Browsing capability, customers on the urlscan Pro platform will be able to scan website while interacting with it through a VNC-like remote video and keyboard session. The primary use-case of Live Browsing is lightweight interaction, like dismissing alerts, confirming captchas or following a single level of redirection to get to the web-content of interest.

Live Browsing can also be used for other research-related tasks where the goal is not to create a scan result at the end. Some of these use-cases include:

• Capturing evidence for take-down purposes.
• Browsing through open directories.
• Browsing through the Tor network via .onion addresses.
• Quickly downloading files, DOM snapshots and screenshots from third-party websites.

Live Browsing is available today as a Beta feature for customers on the urlscan Pro platform.

Real Device Scanning

Some of our customers have encountered malicious websites which evade detection even when faced with the anti-detection methods available in our regular scanner. In some cases the only way to analyze these sites is to use an actual mobile device like an Android phone.

As part of the Live Browsing capability, we have also modified our scanning engine to analyze website using actual mobile devices, providing the high-fidelity output as our standard website scans.

Real Device Scanning is available to select Enterprise and Ultimate customers in Germany and the Netherlands for now. Reach out to support@urlscan.io if you are interest in this new capability.

Scanning Engine Improvements

In addition to the new features we have made various small improvements to our scanning engine and our Live Scanning UI in urlscan Pro:

• We have improved the device and user-agent selection in urlscan Pro.
• We have simplified the settings UI for Live Scans.
• We have improved the way language and locale settings are determined in the scanner.

Current state, availability

Live Browsing and Real Device Scanning are now available via the urlscan Pro platform. These features are currently in Beta, so there are no guarantees about their fitness for a particular purpose. Once these features are promoted to GA we will also implement certain rate limits according to applicable subscription plans.

More on urlscan Pro

If you want to learn about the urlscan Pro platform and how it might be valuable for your organization feel free to reach out to us! We offer free trials with no strings attached. We would be happy to give you a passionate demo of what our platform can do for you. Reach out to us at sales@urlscan.io.