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Lawmaker UI/UX Improvements & Device Health

 


Over the last few weeks we've been working on improving the user interface of Lawmaker with the intent of making it easier and faster for our users to do their work as well as make the experience more enjoyable. 

In this post we will go over those features in more detail. 

User Menu

In the previous versions of Lawmaker, under some contexts, it wasn't always clear what options were tenant-specific (like the API key) and which options were part of the user account, as they were both listed under Settings. 
 
We've changed that by including a user menu where all user-specific options will be listed, with the added bonus of leaving the sidebar less crowded.


The option "My Account" now holds only account-related settings, such as managing your password and subscription.

Dark Mode

Undoubtedly one of the most anticipated features of Lawmaker UI was the inclusion of a dark theme. This option is now available in the User Menu and we're extremely excited you get to start using it.

Notices

We understand the importance of communicating changes or problems in Lawmaker, even though we, technically and purposely, have no way to mass-email our users. Starting today there will be a notice information popup close to the User Menu.
 

This allows us to effectively get our message across in a passive and non-intrusive matter.

lawmaker-agent

Not only the "LM Agent" page in Lawmaker but also the actual agent have been updated for this release.
 
Going forward the API Key that allows your sensors to retrieve the files from Lawmaker will no longer be in the Settings page, as those are now completely account-specific, and instead, the API Key is listed (and manageable) in the LM Agent page itself:
 

 
With this change you now have all the information to learn about, deploy, configure and manage lawmaker-agent in a single page.

Device Health Dashboard

While we've tweeted about it this feature is worth a lot more than 280 characters. 

While the focus of Lawmaker was, and still is, the management of rules and the tasks that usually go into managing an NIDS (or several) deployments at scale, we felt that adding some monitoring capabilities to the platform would go a long way into making the life of operators a lot easier. 

We released the Device Health dashboard in a previous sprint and today we're adding more functionalities to it.


After upgrading lawmaker-agent, and if you opt-in to Device Health, we'll list information about the sensors (rules loaded, last reload time, last connection to Lawmaker API, etc) but also provide you with additional sensor logs such as lawmaker-agent execution output, Suricata service status and the Suricata start log.


It is important that your sensors are running an updated version of lawmaker-agent for these changes to appear in your account.

Duplicate SID messages

Another improvement that was added to this release is how we display the signature name when there are several matches. 

If a SID has more than 1 match, for example in the Emerging Threats improved ruleset for Suricata 5.0.0 and the ruleset for previous versions of Suricata, we will now display both matches:
 
 
We generate the identifiers (what you see when browsing Lawmaker and creating the conditions) from as many rulesets as possible. While we don't have control over the usage of SIDs we believe this option is the best fit for doing this in a way that we don't leave out any SIDs, even if a SID collision happens.

Replicate Condition

In today's release we've added an option to leave the wizard option open so that you can more easily make adjustments between creating similar conditions:

 
And that's it for this update!
 
As always, make sure you're following us on Twitter to keep up to date with what we're doing and feel free to join our Community Slack.

We'd love to hear what you think about these changes or if there's something we could be doing better in Lawmaker.

Don't forget that if you're a school, training provider or security researcher, you can use Lawmaker for FREE! Reach out to us to know more.

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