WhoisXML API Blog

Scammers have always been good at making fake websites look real, even when there were some telltale signs — wrong grammar, typos, pixelated logos. 

But in 2026, legitimate and fake websites can look very similar. Generative AI can produce copy with perfect grammar and spelling as well as high-quality web pages and UI layouts.

So, how do you verify website authenticity today? The short answer is: no single method is enough, but there’s a combination of methods and tools you can try. This guide breaks down 11 methods into three categories — high-confidence tool-based checks; manual verification that still works; and old-school indicators that have mostly lost their value. 

WhoisXML API analyzed 9.2+ million domains registered between 1 and 30 June 2026 that appeared in Newly Registered Domains to identify the most popular registrars, TLD extensions, and other global domain registration trends. This number declined by 12.2% from 10.5+ million NRDs last month.

We also determined the top TLD extensions used by 2.0+ million domains likely registered with malicious intent from the First Watch Malicious Domains Data Feed in June 2026. This number decreased by 31.2% from the previous month.

Next, we studied the top TLD extensions of 1.07+ million confirmed malicious domains from the Threat Intelligence Data Feeds this month, which dropped by 1.1% from 1.08+ million in May.

Finally, we summed up our findings and provided links to the threat reports produced using DNS and domain intelligence sources during the period.

TL;DR

• The feed now captures up to 2x more newly added, updated, dropped, and discovered domains each day.
• Every domain comes with a more complete registration record, because the feed compares its RDAP and WHOIS data and keeps the fullest version.
• No actions needed on your side: the files and the way you integrate them stay the same.

In this post, we explain what the dig command does as well as how to install and use it. We also talk about how to work around its limitations. 

There are plenty of free or almost-free OSINT tools you can find online — ChatGPT can provide you with quite a list. But, as often happens with ChatGPT, some of those tools simply don’t exist, some don’t work anymore, and some provide low-quality data. 

In this post, we have collected several OSINT tools that actually work quite well for different digital research and information gathering purposes, grouped according to their primary use cases. All of these tools could be very handy for different tasks such as cybercrime investigation, threat hunting, offensive cybersecurity exercises, and more.

Note that the tools on this list are mostly for investigating and mapping internet infrastructure and working with indicators of compromise (IoCs), such as network and host artifacts, domain names, IP addresses, and hash values. For tools that look into people, entities, and their internet presence, we suggest that you take a look at Bellingcat’s OSINT toolkit, even though some of the tools mentioned below can help with that as well.

WhoisXML API analyzed 10.5+ million domains registered between 1 and 31 May 2026 that appeared in Newly Registered Domains to identify the most popular registrars, TLD extensions, and other global domain registration trends. This number rose by 3.6% from 10.2+ million NRDs last month.

We also determined the top TLD extensions used by 2.9+ million domains likely registered with malicious intent from the First Watch Malicious Domains Data Feed in May 2026. This number rose by 6.4% from the previous month.

Next, we studied the top TLD extensions of 1.0+ million confirmed malicious domains from the Threat Intelligence Data Feeds this month, which decreased by 2.4% from 1.1+ million in April.

Finally, we summed up our findings and provided links to the threat reports produced using DNS and domain intelligence sources during the period.

If you’ve spent any time on the early internet, you likely saw people threatening each other with phrases like “I am going to find where you live by your IP and then we’ll have a serious conversation.” They implied that knowing your IP address was enough to know your precise location.  

But does your IP address really reveal location data? The answer might be a bit more complicated than just “yes” or “no.” Let’s figure it out.