Category Archives: RBLTracker

PagerDuty Support and Expanded API Functionality

In today’s ever-connected world, integrations are key to realizing the full value of any product. At RBLTracker, we know that organizations have established support, alerting, escalation, and provisioning procedures already in place, and we want to work directly with these processes- not against them.

The newest release of RBLTracker includes two new features, which make integrating RBLTracker into your existing processes, that much easier:

PagerDuty Support

pagerduty_logo_greenPagerDuty provides alerting, on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and incident tracking to increase up time of your apps, servers, websites, and databases.

Customers using the PagerDuty service can now integrate RBLTracker directly into their existing escalation process, by following this simple integration guide.

PagerDuty support is available to all paid RBLTracker accounts. Sign up Today!

Expanded API Functionality

Previous releases of the RBLTracker service provided a limited, read-only API, which let customers integrate RBLTracker into their existing monitoring systems. Today’s release expands that functionality, to allow both read and write functionality, giving customers the ability to manage both Hosts and Contacts, through a simple web-based API.

This functionality allows customers to integrate RBLTracker into existing provisioning processes, to ensure that all hosts that should be monitored- are.

When a new IP address is allocated to a customer in your system, make a simple API call to RBLTracker to enable monitoring:

# wget --post-data="type=rbl&name=Test&host=10.10.10.10" -qO- https://rbltrack.com/api/host/add.json?api_token=x

{
    "status_code": 200,
    "status_message": "Hosts added successfully.",
    "data": [
        {
            "id": "37c46a725dd8adab28d35b9f200c198d",
            "host": "10.10.10.10",
            "name": "Test"
        }
    ],
    "version": "2.0"
}

When an IP address is reclaimed, remove it from our system:

# wget --post-data="id=37c46a725dd8adab28d35b9f200c198d" -qO- https://rbltrack.com/api/host/delete.json?api_token=x

{
    "status_code": 200,
    "status_message": "Host deleted successfully.",
    "version": "2.0"
}

It’s that simple. Only pay for hosts that need to be monitored, and nothing more.

Write functionality is automatically enabled for all customers that currently have access to the RBLTracker API service.

RBLTracker: Pushover Notifications and Temporary Manual Hosts

The RBLTracker service was upgraded to v1.13 today, which includes the following new features:

Pushover Notifications

Pushover makes it easy to get real-time notifications on your Android device, iPhone, iPad, and Desktop. Once you have your Pushover client installed, simply copy and paste your user key into the contacts section of the RBLTracker portal.

pushover

Many companies are already using Pushover for system event notifications; this lets you consolidate all your notifications in one simple application.

Temporary Manual Hosts

Customers on the Ultimate package can now add temporary hosts from the Manual Check section of the web portal.

manual_host

 

These temporary hosts will persist for the life of your session, and will disappear as soon as you log out. This feature is handy for customers that would like to do a quick check on a host not currently listed in your host list.

RBLTracker: Custom Check Frequency, API Changes, and Twitter Support

The RBLTracker service was upgraded to version 1.12 today, which includes the following new features:

Custom Check Frequency

Customers subscribed to the Ultimate package can now adjust the frequency of their host checks, using a simple drop-down list from the Profile -> Settings section:

custom_frequency

 

At the moment, customers can select from a 6 hour window, to a 48 hour window. Finer grained controls will likely be added in future releases.

API Updates

We’ve made some very basic changes to the API service:

  • Replaced all instances of the term “blocked” with “listed”. The “blocked” terminology is still available, but customers should migrate to the new terminology as soon as possible, as it will be deprecated in future releases.
  • The matched RBLs have been added to the response data. This includes the RBL matched, the RBL website, and the RBL output from DNS.
  • The API version number is now included in the response object.

An updated API document is available from the API Access section of the RBLTracker portal.

Twitter Notifications

Customers can now add their Twitter screen name to their account as notification contacts. RBLTracker will send a direct message to your Twitter account anytime a host matches (or based on your scheduling settings:

notify_twitter

 

Customers must follow the @rbltracker Twitter account with the same Twitter handle in order to received direct messages. We also cannot send URLs in direct messages, due to limitations on the Twitter platform- hopefully this is something they will correct in the future.

If you have any questions or comments about any of these new features, please let us know @ info@rbltracker.com

RBLTracker: Custom RBLs, Yandex Safe Browsing, and More

This evening, we’ve released a new version of the RBLTracker service, which includes all sorts of new features, including:

Custom RBLs

The custom RBL feature lets you add custom RBLs and URIBLs to your account, which RBLTracker does not normally check.

custom_rbls

If you have a paid or in-house RBL that you’d like to use, you can add it here, and centralize your monitoring with RBLTracker, and take advantage of our automated checks, and alerting functionality.

Yandex Safe Browsing Support

RBLTracker now has support to monitor the Yandex Safe Browsing database, alongside the Google Safe Browsing database.

yandex_support

The Google and Yandex Safe Browsing databases include lists of website domains that may be dangerous to visitors, because they are suspected of phishing or malware.

The Google Safe Browsing service is already built-in to both the Chrome and Firefox web browsers, the two most popular web browsers on the internet. If your website is compromised because of an outdated WordPress or Drupal installation, your visitors will receive a warning, telling them that YOUR website is dangerous and should be avoided.

A full list of changes included in this release are available below. Any questions or comments, please let us know @ info@rbltracker.com

 

Release version 1.11

  • Added support for monitoring the Yandex Safe Browsing database.
  • Added support for custom RBLs and URIBLs that the RBLTracker system does not normally monitor, for example, paid or internal RBLs.
  • Added support to download invoices from the billing section of the portal. Customers can also add more detailed billing information through the Profile section of the web portal.
  • Added additional pricing options for customers with more than 1000, 2500, and 5000 hosts using the Ultimate package.
  • Added an option for customers to delete their accounts.

RBLTracker: Custom RBL Profiles

Now selecting which RBLs to use with RBLTracker is even easier than before!

As of today, customers can create custom RBL Profiles which let them select from over 60 RBLs, 20 URIBLs, and the Google Safe Browsing database, and then apply this profile to multiple hosts, removing the need to customize each host separately.

Customers can even mark one of their RBL Profiles as the “default” profile, and it will automatically be used anytime a new host is added to the system- either manually, or using the bulk host loader.

How Does This Work?

From the RBL Profiles section, give the new profile a unique name, and click “Add RBL Profile” to select which RBLs to use:

rbl_profiles1

Then either edit a host and select this new RBL Profile from the drop down, or select the RBL profile when adding a new host:

rbl_profiles2

About RBLTracker

RBLTracker is a fully automated RBL monitoring service, which checks your IP addresses and website domains against the most frequently used real-time black lists (RBLs) and Safe Browsing Databases.

Don’t waste time by manually checking all your servers yourself- RBLTracker does it automatically, without any user intervention.