WhoisXML API Blog

How Authorities Can Clamp Down on Cybercrime with Bulk Domain Lookups

Nominet’s takedown of 28,937 malicious sites is a small triumph for law enforcement and other internet stakeholders. With help from authorities, the domain registry has been on a quest to purge the .uk namespace of rogue domains since 2009. Now, for the first time in five years, the total number of suspended domains has finally reflected a decline. The figure may not seem like a lot, considering that it only accounts for 0.22% of the 13 million domains registered in the U.K. Still, it was a milestone for an industry fraught with prolific bad actors. In the U.K. alone, an average of 800 cyber attacks per hour hit councils. This number translates into around 263 million in just half a year.

Curbing cybercrime is an essential undertaking for internet authorities, in light of new digital technologies, and the Internet’s evolving business model. Unfortunately, lack of resources at both the domain level and cybersecurity know-how, as well as legal barriers, slow down authorities in their efforts to hunt down perpetrators. This can be made easier, though, with a bulk domain lookup solution.

Bulk WHOIS API is a good example of a research tool that cyber investigators, electronic crime units, and regulatory agencies can rely on to faster inspect a significant volume of domains. With an IP address, email address, or domain name, users can obtain pertinent registrant information for a group of web addresses. Let’s take a closer look at how users can get more out of the solution.

IP Netblocks API to Fight Cybercrime: Performing an IP Range Lookup & Other Steps

It is pretty standard for cybercriminals to spend time exploring a network for weaknesses they can exploit. That’s why cybersecurity experts must continuously monitor their systems and logs for any signs of future attacks. They can do so with various IP and domain intelligence tools, notably using IP Netblocks API as a first step.

How exactly? In this post, we provide a demonstration of how organizations can better ensure their infrastructure’s security and possibly even prevent breaches.

3 Steps in Using Reverse IP/DNS Checks to Create an Attack Profile

Knowing the enemy, as they say, is winning half the battle. But in the world of cybersecurity, identifying the enemy can be very difficult sometimes. That said, creating an attack profile to know what type of enemy you could be up against is a good starting point. For all you know, a cyber attacker could be halfway around the world or right next door.

For that reason, organizations should enlist all possible resources to help them create an attack profile. Reverse IP/DNS API, which performs reverse IP/DNS checks, is one resource worth looking into. In a nutshell, the program allows cybersecurity experts to get a list of all domains that share the same IP address. As such, it could help unmask connections between indicators of compromise (IoCs), specifically, IP addresses and domain names.

Bulk Email Verification and Validation for 3 Cyber Threat Protection Use Cases

Email validation is one of the most potent measures to ensure that digital marketers’ messages get through to their intended recipients. But amid the rise in cybercrime and fraud, the practice has become more than that. Today, email validation is also a means for infosec professionals to vet senders to make sure that opening their messages won’t lead to a compromise.

Email validation has also turned into a viable option for streaming service providers to prevent fake or fraudulent subscribers from gaining access to the content they’re unauthorized to view. Amid this backdrop, organizations would do well to add bulk email verification to their standard business protocols. Here is why.

Integrating a Newly Registered Domains Database into Enterprise Cybersecurity Strategies

It’s generally agreed that newly registered domains are potential sources of threats. After all, many of these domain registrations are made opportunistically—sometimes even in bulk, following public announcements and global events. While not all of these domains have to be avoided at all costs, they certainly deserve more scrutiny than others that have been established for years.

The good news is that monitoring newly registered domains is doable with the help of the Newly Registered & Just Expired Domains Database.

How a Domain Checker Helps in Digital Forensics and Incident Response

Digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) experts have a unique yet essential role in maintaining the overall cybersecurity of any organization. They are responsible for gathering data about ongoing attacks or attempts, mitigating their possible effects, and implementing post-attack actions. That includes digging deeper to obtain evidence to enhance their cyber defense as well as aiding in law enforcement efforts.

The fact that attacks are getting stealthier and more sophisticated, though, in terms of tools, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) make DFIR experts’ jobs ever more difficult. They must not only resolve issues in as little time as possible but also be there to prevent successful attacks from causing irreparable damage to systems or their companies’ reputations.

Timely detection is, therefore, the answer. Then again, DFIR experts get bombarded by numerous notifications from security tools every day and thus can get easily overwhelmed by false positives. So they need solutions that can help them quickly verify the validity and quality of domains, IP addresses, and email addresses that their users come in contact with. Domain search solutions such as WHOIS Lookup and its API version WHOIS API may just be what they are looking for. Let’s discuss the reasons why.

Domain and IP Intelligence: Tracking the Spike in Coronavirus-Themed Domain Registrations

The first cases of COVID-19 infection came to the fore in December 2019. Five months later, the world is still reeling from the disease. The numbers are overwhelming. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, more than 4 million people worldwide have gotten infected, over 290,000 of whom have died from the disease at the time of writing. And dismayingly, these numbers are still expected to rise.

In response, governments all over the world have imposed varying degrees of social distancing strategies. People are urged to stay home, schools are closed, mass transportation in many countries is suspended, and countless small businesses have ceased operations. For the majority, one consolation of being in home quarantine is their access to the Internet and, therefore, the world. But even on the Web, people are not safe from the virus.

Using our IP and domain intelligence, we detected an increasing trend toward coronavirus-themed domain bulk registrations—some of which may have to do with the proliferation of coronavirus-themed cybercrimes taking advantage of the pandemic. Let us show you our key findings.

Essential tools for server operators in action

The Internet is a very dangerous place. A server with a public IP address could become the subject of an attack virtually at any time of its operation. Indeed, any service that is vulnerable to any extent is likely to be exploited at some point if left this way; no server operator can deny playing this cat-and-mouse game with hackers. 

Not all hackers meet the stereotypes attributed to them, though. One does not have to be an ingenious IT specialist with very tricky ideas to try and exploit servers. Picking an exploit kit written by someone else, and letting it run on arbitrary IP addresses is essentially free, and it will surely harvest something: sooner or later it will run into a content management system on a website whose owner failed to apply some important security update, or web-based database management console left open to the public. All these could result in an administrator’s access to the server, which may lead to dramatic consequences for the owner. 

It is always instructive, for instance, to frequently take a good look at the access log of your web servers. Let us conduct a bit of an investigation to illustrate what is typically going on.