Whois

The Big Business of Cybercrime at FS-ISAC, IACC and INTA 2013 Spring Conferences

Susan Prosser | May 21, 2013 | 0 Comments

This spring contained, as usual, the spring “conference season”. And, DomainTools attended a variety of them. The back-to-back-to-back conferences we exhibited at were FS-ISAC, IACC and INTA. Each of the three conferences had sessions covering the pervasiveness of cybercrime generally, but each also focused in on areas specifically pertaining to their own discipline: the security of financial networks and accounts, the sale of counterfeit goods, and online intellectual property/brand protection, respectively.

Santas Favorite Whois Contest Winners!

Monica | January 4, 2013 | 1 Comment

Thank you to all of you who entered the Santas Favorite Whois contest! Santa had a wonderful time reading all of the entries and drew the following names out of the entry bag. The following three people won a FREE DomainTools Professional membership for one year (or a FREE Professional membership renewal for one year) if he or she is a current DomainTools member):

“DomainTools is one of the critical weapons that we have in combating counterfeiting on the Internet. We use it on a daily basis to monitor domain names and keep track of registrant information.”

Joseph C. Gioconda
Attorney, Counselor at Law and Founder
Gioconda Law

“Small web professionals need all the help they can get to protect their ideas and future plans on their assets, what better way than to use the awesome Domain Tools to catch up with what other similar sites are doing to protect theirs! Without tools like it its like walking down a blind alley knowing you probably will get mugged.”

Anita Sudhakar
CEO
SmartWebby.com

“DomainTools is a very valuable service to be because it allows me to do bulk registration lookups and greatly aids me in trying to attribute network based attacks against my customers. I have used your tools for years and find that they are really the only player in this space to date.”

Chuck Yarbrough
Senior IT Security Instructor/Developer
SAIC

The Numbers Behind Whois Privacy

Tim Chen | November 16, 2012 | 3 Comments

Whois Privacy is an important topic here at DomainTools. After all, a primary use of our Whois History product is to get behind Whois Privacy if possible. After all, a primary use of our Whois History product is to get behind Whois Privacy if possible. Just this week Brian Krebs wrote an interesting blog post that does a good job of showing the power of DomainTools’ Whois History.

Whois is also a prevailing topic seemingly every year at ICANN Conferences, and no debate about Whois data is complete without also discussing the benefits and costs of allowing domain owners to utilize Whois proxy services in order to shield their domain ownership from the public eye.

DomainTools’ New Mobile Whois Product

Monica | June 22, 2012 | 3 Comments

We just launched a new mobile Whois product on our live DomainTools.com site! What this means: It’s a complete re-design and rebuild of the Whois Lookup product you’ve come to rely on. And, it’s specifically for mobile devices.

The Story Behind Face.com

Monica | June 5, 2012 | 3 Comments

There’s been a lot of buzz last week about Face.com being acquired by Facebook. To find out more about the historical aspect of Face.com, there are many research tools you can leverage via DomainTools to piece together a full story:

1. What’s the Whois History of Face.com…how many record changes have there been over the years and what are the details? There are 976 historical whois records associated with Face.com dating back as far as 2001 when it was registered with Face Software based in New York.

Was Your Domain Used for Porn? How to Avoid a Costly Mistake

Susan Prosser | August 18, 2011 | 5 Comments

With the launch of .xxx domain names coming soon, I thought now would be a good time to address an important topic sometimes overlooked by domain buyers: how to avoid accidentally purchasing a domain that was once used for pornography.

Almost as long as the web has been around, companies have been selling content filtering software. Parents and network admins can use it to stop their kids, employees or users from accessing inappropriate web sites at work and at home, or in colleges, schools and libraries.

How Whois Busted the “IE users are dumb” Hoax

Susan Prosser | August 4, 2011 | 1 Comment

If you’re a DomainTools customer, you already know the value of Whois for researching the history of domain names, but not everybody is as savvy.

A hoaxer this week managed to fool some of the world’s most respected news organizations into reporting that Internet Explorer users are “dumber” than users of other browsers, and it was a Whois search that eventually blew the story open.

Dozens of outlets – including CNN, the BBC and Forbes – fell for a story put out by a fake Canadian company called AptiQuant, which claimed to have proved scientifically that IE users have below-average IQs.

DomainTools INTA Recap

Monica | May 20, 2011 | 0 Comments

We just got back from the International Trademark Association (INTA) conference in San Francisco! It ran May 14-18 and we had a great time meeting a good number of the 8,500 attendees from 140 countries. Each day, had engaging conversations about the industry, DomainTools, and it was awesome to see customers come up and introduce themselves with “We use you guys all the time”. For us, it was also enriching to hear about specific anecdotes about how specific tools like Reverse Whois, Trademark Alert, Whois, etc. are being leveraged. Be sure to read our press release about our INTA attendance if you haven’t seen it yet.

Reverse Whois Report Support Q&A Part II

Monica | May 13, 2011 | 0 Comments

As the Reverse WHOIS report is one of our most widely used products, we wanted to continue from the April 21st blog post on the topic and review additional important product and membership aspects that our users often ask about. Thanks in advance for your commentary and feedback regarding all of our products and services.

What are the options for Whois Reports? What is the difference?
As most users are aware, we present two versions of this report, the ‘current only’ version and the ‘current and historical’ version.

The difference lies in the scope of your search. For ‘current only’ reports, you’ll get a list of domain names where your search term is in the current Whois record for that domain.

For ‘current and historic’ reports, we look back in time to find domain names with Whois records that matched your search at some point in the past. You’ll also see Whois record dates listed when you choose historic. We also provide access to those matched historic Whois records directly from the purchased report.

Reverse Whois Report Support Q&A

Tim Perez | April 21, 2011 | 0 Comments

We are often asked why a known domain name was not returned in a Reverse WHOIS report. The answer: all WHOIS record formats vary according to the registry or registrar.

One of the easiest things to do first, if you know a domain name for a target registrant, is to look the domain name up with our WHOIS service.

The detailed WHOIS records we provide will show how the registrant’s name is presented as well as the email he or she currently uses. This should allow a user to know specifically what email address is associated to that registrant as well as how his or her name is listed. This is important to note because the name will either be presented as ‘John Doe’ or ‘Doe, John’. This can make a significant difference.