WhoisXML API Blog

Fraud and Identity Theft Prevention By Using an IP Location Database

Offering high-quality customer experience (UX) often means personalizing and customizing products and services. Businesses have to collect personally identifiable information (PII) from customers, such as date of birth, credit card details, addresses, and other information. This is also the kind of data fraudsters are after so they can carry out identity theft.

Identity theft isn’t even a new crime, which sprung up from the digitalization of business processes. It has been around since the early 1900s. Until recently, fraudsters emptied contents of garbage bins to find copies of legal documents with personal information.

How a Reverse IP & Domain Lookup Can Save Organizations from Stale DNS Records

Every website that can be accessed on the Internet comes with an IP address that points to a specific domain name. Each domain-to-IP address mapping is recorded in the Domain Name System (DNS), which makes it possible for users to not have to remember numeric addresses to reach a particular website while still letting DNS resolvers do their matchmaking work. And for this to happen, a DNS record contains many crucial details about a website accessible via the World Wide Web.

Sorting Gray Alerts Using Domain Reputation Scores

The job of managed detection and response (MDR) teams, as their name suggests, is not limited to detecting cybersecurity threats. They are also responsible for carrying out the right actions in response to specific threat alerts.

If there were less than a hundred alerts, and they were all black or white, everything would go smoothly; at least when it comes to following up with the appropriate responses. Alerts with a definite malicious component would then be processed easily to quarantining and blocking stages, while benign alerts are ignored. But the cybersecurity landscape has become more complicated than that, for several reasons, including the facts that:

Typosquatting Daily Data Feed: the new enabler in the fight against phishing and malware

One result of our reseach and development is the introduction of the new "typosquatting data feed", an innovative data set based on our long-standing experience with cybersecurity and the Domain Name System. In what follows we will demonstrate how this new resource can be used efficiently in the fight against spam, phishing and malware.

The main idea behind the new data feed is the observation that domain names which were registered on the same day and have similar names have an increased likelihood of being involved in a range of IT scams, including typosquatting attacks, domain name hijacking, and also phishing and malware. So, we have developed a technology for finding these groups of domain names.

Avoiding Adverse Effects on SEO through Domain Name Ownership History Checks

When building their online presence, entrepreneurs and website owners are bombarded with tips and advice on search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. Among them are the publishing of high-quality and relevant content regularly, using metatags and alt tags, and using long-tail keywords.

All these are valid and effective, but your SEO ranking strategy should begin at the very first stage of website creation—choosing a domain name. In this post, we explored the effects of domain name ownership history on an organization's SEO ranking, and how a simple check using WHOIS History Search can help users avoid related challenges.

How Name Server Checks Protect Your Network Against DNS Tunneling

Being a sort of open phonebook of the Internet, the Domain Name System (DNS) can be a corporate network’s weakest link. The main problem lies in how it works. As a way to ensure that devices communicate correctly over the Internet, DNS servers map IP addresses to domains in response to user queries.

More specifically, when a user searches for a domain name on their browser, the browser sends a query to the stub resolver, an operating system component, before querying the local name server.

DNS Flood Attack: What It Is and How to Avoid It with DNS Lookup Online Tools

These days, even large-scale operations suffer from Domain Name System (DNS) flood attacks despite using advanced solutions and subscriptions to the best anti-denial-of-service (DoS) protection services. Attackers always seem to come up with a way to launch distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks of unmatched sizes to take their victims’ sites offline. To date, the worst DDoS attack seen was 1.7 TBps strong. Resulting losses are difficult to ignore, as these range between $120,000 and $2 million.

How to Find a Netblock Owner with an IP Netblocks WHOIS Database

IP netblocks can be considered a neighborhood to which consecutive IP addresses belong. As in the real world, there are good and bad neighborhoods. Fortunately, sophisticated threat intelligence tools enable security engineers to distinguish one from the other.

Traditionally, users can check computers communicating over a network by using a simple ping command to find unresponsive or misbehaving nodes. A ping test sends packets to a server and reveals if the same number of packets were returned, as well as how long it took the destination to issue a response.