Open for business

I was happily developing new functionality when things started to get out of hand. More registrations and data came in than I or the the system could handle. If this was to continue I would run out of resources pretty fast, so I had to stop receiving free beta users.

To receive new users and add new functionality I need more resources, and for that I need funding. I decided to bootstrap it and open paid subscriptions. This should insure that the funding grows in line with the need for resources, on the one condition that I set the right prices. And there is the thing. I know what I need right now with the current users, but I can't possible know how many users will keep coming, if costs per user will stay the same and what I'll need for all the extra functionality I have in mind.

So I took a guess and created three subscription plans. I'll try to keep the prices as low as I can and of course I'll listen to the wishes of paying customers first. The current beta users can all keep their free beta account, as a thank you for being a beta user.

Signing up for a paid subscription can be done here

Why deleting stuff is hard

To demonstrate some functionality I added a random newsite to an account with about 50 urls. Within minutes, the ShadowTrackr had found hosts, related urls, hosts for the related urls, certificates, and more. It was all fine until I noticed the lack of a delete button. I naively implemented a delete button for the urls and hosts under settings and clicked it. The random newsite was gone. And within a few minutes appeared again. Since the related host and some subdomains were still in the system, the pay level domain was easily found again and automatically added.

Against better judgement, I manually deleted the hosts and subdomains and quickly deleted the url. Again, within minutes all reappeared. It was even worse than the situation than I started with: you can only delete the url's and hosts you add manually and the orginal url now appeared as a related asset found by the system (without a delete button). Adding delete buttons for related assets is useless, since they are related and will always be rediscovered. It turns out deleting an asset was much harder than I thought, so I tried putting the issue on my todo list and started working on other stuff. I just couldn't figure out what the proper delete implementation should be.

Off course, users will notice a problem like this and start complaining (as they should). I had to implement a way to delete assets, but I couldn't decide how it should work. Should I blindly delete all related assets? Including ones that might be shared with other urls or hosts? Should related messages be deleted from the timeline too? That would mean that you might miss historical data on an attack targeted at you just because your server changed its ip address.

Since I can't come up with an implementation that works for all users in all circumstances, there is now a delete button with two checkboxes. One is for deleting related messages from the timeline, and the other is for aggresively deleting related assets. It might be a bit too aggresive and delete the shared server that also hosts your other websites, but I figured (and tested) these will be found again from related assets. I expect the solution with the optional checkboxes will work for everyone, but please let me know if you have problems.

Monitoring Bitcoins, Ethereum and Zcash wallets

I've been planning to do something with digital currencies for a while and after WannaCry and this week's Petya outbreak developed balance monitoring straight away. There's a couple of reasons why this is useful.

If you have a stash of bitcoins for speculation or as emergency fund to pay ransoms (no you shouldn't, but I'm not judging), you will want to know when something happens to it. Digital currency disappearing without your approval is a strong indicator of either fraud or an evil hacker on your system. You can now configure ShadowTrackr to send a push notification to your iPhone when the balance of a certain Bitcoin, Ethereum or Zcash wallet changes.

You can also use this as a digital booby trap that fires when your VIP is hacked. Just leave (the keys to) a small amount on the VIP's laptop and make sure he knows not to touch it. If you see changes on the blockchain with the address of these canarycoins and it was not your VIP, then for sure the VIP's laptop is compromised. Not every evil hacker steals bitcoins of course, so it doesn't detect every breach. But I think it's still useful because this trick has about zero false positives.

So, why did WannaCry and Petya prompt me to do this now? To be honest, I was just curious how many victims would pay the ransom.