WhoisXML API Blog

Easily Know All The Web Sites Hosted On An IP Address

Moving further into investigating & researching IP address, WhoisXmlApi is really excited to announce the launch of Reverse IP API! Whether you’re researching a potential partner or an incident, understanding the online reputation of an IP address or a domain is incredibly important. With Reverse IP API, by simply querying an IP address you can get the list of all the other domains that share the same Internet host (i.e. the same IP address). Results include all gTLD, new TLD, and any known ccTLD domains. This can be a very useful tool when one is trying to gain context or situational awareness relating to any IP address.   Over the last few years, online reputation management & security has become a huge concern for many companies. Knowing your network reputation is, therefore, an important part of your security knowledge. By knowing all the domains sharing your IP address you can check for spamming & malicious websites. It's best to not have your IP associated with harmful content. Hosts with a dubious reputation may affect your search engine ranking, email delivery or even have your site blacklisted.   Sometime, Internet Service Providers may also block a website’s IP address in case it contains malicious or illegal content. Naturally, other sites sharing that IP address is blocked as well. You can prevent such as scenario by taking proactive steps.   Besides this, since Reverse IP API reveals how many sites you share the host with, you can use this knowledge to help your online brand as well. Sometimes to maximize profits web hosts oversubscribe i.e. sell more websites than the server can handle. Oversubscription affects the download speed of your site and thus may also affect conversion.   Reverse IP API can also be beneficial to help research hosting providers or parking companies so as to find the most suitable one for you. You would want to avoid hosting providers that cramp up to many websites on a server.   With the help of our Reverse IP lookup, you can conduct research - find other domains owned by the same person even if they have Whois privacy. You can research the market in a targeted region or niche. Or you can monitor the domain life cycle of all domains on the IPs of your niche competition to spot and buy expiring ones before anyone else.   Reverse IP is also very popular with cybercrime investigators solving any kind of crime: identity theft, online fraud, piracy, etc. During or after an intrusion incident, a Reverse IP API can be used to identify the attackers’ host names. It can also help to identify the attack surface by discovering all the hosts and IPs related to a given target website/ IP. You can also identify any websites on the host that contain vulnerabilities to exploit.   Reverse IP API is an incredibly powerful tool with many high-value business applications. With WhoisXmlApi you can quickly & easily know all the following details about an IP address:

We Know No Boundaries!

The term Internet Protocol address or more commonly known as an IP address definitely needs no introduction to most people. It is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network. With DNS Lookup API  from WhoisXmlApi, users can easily map a domain name to its IP address. While knowing the IP address can have its uses, many professionals need to know the real world location of the IP address as well, be it to detect online fraud or to locate online visitors. This is now possible with Geolocation technology, which helps determine the physical, real-world location of a person or device using IP address. And we at WhoisXmlApi are proud to venture into this arena with the release of our latest product IP Geolocation API, which caters to just that!

Using BASH and other Linux tools on Windows 10 for processing Whois data

This is technical blog for our subscribers of daily or quarterly data feeds to facilitate the use of our client-side BASH scripts and perform other operations on their data.

This blog is for you if you are a Windows user and want to use BASH for processing Whois data. We describe how you can set up an environment in Windows which does not only facilitate the use of BASH scripts of WhoisXML API, but gives a general access of many tools and features available mainly in Linux and UNIX type systems. So if you are interested in a Linux-type approach of handling these data or developing, but you do not want to set up a separate (virtual) computer with a Linux and you want to see your files within your Windows system directly, please proceed reading.

Unintended consequences of GDPR on privacy and Spam

On May 25, 2018 the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation will go into full effect. This means that privacy regulations will have a significant impact on how companies handle peoples personal data. General Data Protection Regulation is a regulation that is designed to protect privacy of EU citizens and its residents. What are some other consequences that the GDPR can have? It means that they can severely restrict access to technology for its EU residents and companies. So, what does this mean for the future of Whois? Well we have all heard about GDPR and its effect on Whois. I echo the sentiment by Neil Schwartzman that restricting Whois access would increase spam. Why? Antispam software relies on Whois data to detect spams. Spammers will be able to gain access to people’s contact information from everywhere on the web, including data warehouses, social media, and so many others. They will continue do what they have been doing for years so long as there are commercial incentives.

WhoisXmlApi’s 2017 Year in Review

The beginning of a new year is always a great time to take a step back and see what one has achieved in the previous year. For us at WhoisXmlApi, 2017 has been a greatly challenging as well as a very rewarding year. We have tried to stretch our boundaries and are happy to see some of our ideas taking shape in the form of domain data products & services that our users are really appreciating. When we started WhoisXmlApi in 2010, our vision was very clear, to be a one-stop shop for domain data for all the industries who need it. To serve that goal, year after year, we have created domain data related products & services and 2017 has been no different!

Defending Your Brands Against Cybersquatters

In October 2009, Michael Bosman, a California resident, registered worldwrestlingfederation.com with Melbourne IT, a domain name registrar in Australia. Three days later, he tried to sell the name to the World Wrestling Federation Entertainment Inc. (WWF) for a huge profit.

Setting up a whois database from WHOIS XML API data

This is technical blog describing how you can download bulk data from a data feed subscription at WhoisXML API, and how you can use them to set up a local Whois database on your server.

Our starting point is that you need data for some domains in files or in a database, for a given period of time. We describe how to achieve this goal in two Sections: the first one describes how you can access and download the data you need. The second one describes how to set up a database from the downloaded data, ranging from relational databases such as MySQL to other, noSQL storage methods, such as MongoDB.

The use of Whois databases in practice and research

This blog explains, without completeness, how you can make use of Whois data, especially in a form of a Whois database in various areas of marketing, IT security, etc.

In the present blog we give a holistic overview, of at least a part of applications of WHOIS databases. As a practitioner or a researcher, you can broaden your insight get some inspiration and possibly find new ideas and starting points for further study.