FractalScan is becoming Hexiosec ASM
Key Facts
As of 30th September 2024 FractalScan Surface will be changing name to Hexiosec ASM.
For our existing FractalScan customers nothing changes, except we’ll be at https://asm.hexiosec.com instead of https://app.fractalscan.com. After the 30th, if you visit the old address you’ll be redirected to the new address. Easy!
If you are an API user and use the address https://app.fractalscan.com/api/, you’ll be automatically redirected to https://asm.hexiosec.com/api/. You will just need to check that any code or scripts you use follow a redirect. After the 30th we recommend switching to the new domain as soon as possible.
All our users will need to be using the new address by 3rd March 2025.
What’s happening
This is actually both a company name change and a product name change, so you’ll notice our billing will start coming from Hexiosec Limited.
To sum up the changes, on 30th September 2024:
The legal entity Red Maple Technologies Limited will become Hexiosec Limited.
FractalScan Surface will become Hexiosec ASM, or Hexiosec Attack Surface Management in its longer form.
Trebuchet, our secure and private file transfer application, will become Hexiosec Transfer. For now, we will keep the Trebuchet brand name for non-enterprise customers.
Why are we rebranding?
When we started, back in 2018, we were a boutique cyber security consultancy with one name and one brand - Red Maple Technologies.
The name didn’t tell anyone what we did, but this didn’t tend to matter since all our consulting work came from referrals and recommendations.
Quick aside 1 - Why did we call ourselves Red Maple Technologies?
Like many founders before us, we started thinking along the lines of Adjective + Noun. It's a pretty common approach, and many a company have a perfectly serviceable name in this format - think BlackBerry, Darktrace, CrowdStrike, FireEye.
The name Red Maple came from the three founders having links to Canada. One being an actual Canadian, one having a daughter born in Canada, and me having a load of ancestors who emigrated to Canada (yes that's a bit tenuous I know).
Things got more complicated when we developed our own products.
‘Red Maple Technologies’ isn’t the sort of name you can simply append ‘ASM’, or ‘Transfer’ to. This tends to work best when you have a one-word brand name - I’m thinking Apple and Apple Watch.
So instead we decided to give them their own brand identities, ‘Trebuchet’ and ‘FractalScan’. However, this approach suffered from the lack of association with the company behind them.
Quick aside 2 - Where did the names Trebuchet and FractalScan come from?
The name 'Trebuchet' came from a moment of genius from its creator, Rich Young. The Trebuchet app is for sending files to people, securely and privately. Change this to 'flinging' files and it conjures up some form of a throwing device. Enter the medieval siege warfare machine that is the 'Trebuchet', used to fling over castle walls heavy objects such as burning fireballs and, on occasion, livestock.
Such was the unintended success of his choice of name for Trebuchet that Rich decided for our next product (an ASM platform) he'd make sure he'd choose a name so bad that it couldn't possibly stick. He called it 'Creepy Crawly' - in that it 'crawls' the internet and the graph data model was quite 'spidery'.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that name almost did stick. It seemed a lot of people liked the name Creepy Crawly, so we were tempted. To save us though, Tim came up with the name 'FractalScan' instead, which was much better. The 'Fractal' element intending to give the impression of 'fingers reaching out recursively' as it discovers assets on the internet.
We’ve had three different websites as well, which spreads the SEO and internet traffic, and we’ve struggled to link them all together in a coherent way. For example, our Trebuchet customers receive billing from Red Maple Technologies and this can be confusing. Also, they might not get to hear about our Attack Surface Management product FractalScan.
At our core we see ourselves as providers of cyber security solutions, whether that be through consulting services or products.
Our mission statement is:
Drawing on our heritage, expertise and ways of working, we deliver the highest quality engineering and cyber security consulting, and best-in-class products.
So for a long time we’ve been wanting to combine everything into a single brand. Our consulting services are very much part of our identity as a business - it’s where we started and it keeps us fresh and appreciative of real-life problems that customers have. Our products are to us more of an extension of these services in SaaS form, and our consultancy team often use them as part of the delivery of cyber security services.
Coming up with a new name
Naming things is hard. There’s no doubt about it. It feels like it should be easy, but it’s deceptively difficult. Companies have spent millions of dollars on branding, and it’s only when you try to do it yourself that you understand why.
Our main criteria in coming up with a new name was that it must:
- be free from contention (trade marks especially),
- have the .com domain available (and lots of other TLDs too).
That narrowed down the options considerably. We also thought it should be a name that was obvious how to pronounce, as well as being a single word.
How did we find one? Well like the good engineers we are, we wrote a tool.
Actually Scott and I independently came up with tools (one in Golang, one in Python) that did roughly the same thing - mash some characters together and look them up to see if they are already taken.
The basic algorithm was to take starts of names (such as ’tor’, ‘arc’, ‘cyb’ etc.), and join them with ends of names (such as ’lytics’, ’net’, ’enium’ and so on).
This was used to generate about 100 candidate names, which were automatically checked to see if the .com was available. Quite amazingly this weeded out a good 50% of the candidates, which goes to show how congested the DNS name space is!
After doing this about 10 times we had a list of approximately 500 non-contested names, which we whittled down by voting on what we liked.
This gave us approximately 20 strong candidates.
The next step was to do a deep search on worldwide trademarks. Here the thanks goes to Patrick, our General Counsel, who is extremely thorough and - would you believe it - only gave 2 of the 20 the green light! All the others were either very close to other trade marks, or a bit-too-close-to-be-worth-risking-it.
So what were the two names? Well one of them was ‘Hexiosec’ obviously. The other? - well let’s just keep that in reserve for now :).
Hexiosec fits well for us because the ‘sec’ relates to ‘security’ and our FractalScan logo is a hexagon, but as I’ve increasingly discovered throughout this exercise, it doesn’t really matter what you call yourself - no one really cares or remembers the reasoning.
It just has to be something you like and are happy to stick with. So it’s farewell to Red Maple Technologies and FractalScan - and long live Hexiosec!
