What Are Root Asset Candidates? How Do You Select or Exclude Them?

Attaxion continuously scans verified root assets for dependent assets. In the process, it often identifies neighboring root assets that may also belong to your organization. Within the platform, these assets are listed as root asset candidates, which you can either approve or decline.

To start managing root asset candidates, click Management from the menu on the left, and go to the Root Asset Candidates tab.

In the table, you can see the list of root asset candidates with their names and asset types, as well as the second-level domain (SLD) with which the candidate is associated (if the candidate is a subdomain). For each candidate, you’ll also see the root asset from which the candidate was derived, together with any tags specified for it.

There is also a Confidence column that indicates Attaxion’s level of certainty about the association between an identified candidate and its corresponding verified root asset, which may help you decide whether to include or exclude the candidate from scanning.

You can sort the root asset candidate list by the columns mentioned above. 

Before accepting or declining a candidate, you may want to learn more about it. To do this, click on its name to open the asset candidate details. There, you can see the discovery methods Attaxion used and the path that led it to the candidate.

Approving Root Asset Candidates

When you’re ready to accept candidates, select one or more root asset candidates, click the Approve button, and choose I’m sure, approve. This action will designate the candidate as one of your root assets. Note that you will still need to verify that your organization really owns or controls the asset, using the standard root asset verification process described here.

If, for some reason, you want to remove a newly approved root asset, you can learn how to remove a root asset from Attaxion here.

Declining Root Asset Candidates

To exclude one or more root asset candidates and remove them from the list, select them, click the Decline button, and choose I’m sure, decline. This action will remove the asset from the root asset candidate list and place it in the Archived Assets tab.

This bulk action can also be applied to all root asset candidates with the same SLD. To sort the list by SLD, click on the filter icon in the SLD column and search for the target SLD. 

Then, you may select all or some of the subdomains under the selected SLD and click Approve or Decline.

Clicking Approve will prompt you to confirm by selecting I’m sure, approve. 

When you click Decline, you will be prompted to either decline the selected asset candidates, decline all candidates from the same root asset, or decline all candidates from the same SLD.