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Our blog is lovingly referred to as “Domains of our Lives” internally at DomainTools, and is home to a variety of topics ranging from technical pieces to pithy commentary on the security industry. All in all, it’s an opportunity to provide our readers with snapshots of what makes DomainTools unique. 2015 was a pivotal year for us as we not only grew substantially, but we also released our platform flagship cybercrime investigation platform, Iris Investigate. To celebrate our monumental year, I am pleased to share our most-read posts from 2015:


Part 2: Hacker Movies (and Cybersecurity Concerns) Go Mainstream

The early reviews of Blackhat are in, and it doesn’t look favorable. Maybe Hollywood will have better luck depicting cybercrime on television with shows like Scorpion and the upcoming CSI: Cyber. But in any case, we’ll tread on with our 3 part series of movie reviews. In our previous post about Tron and WarGames, we […]


Bulk Parsed Whois—No API Required!

As you already know, DomainTools has worked tirelessly to build the world’s best database of Whois records, with coverage spanning all of the ccTLDs and each new gTLD as it comes online—not to mention the “big six” TLDs: com, net, org, biz, info, and us. We believe we have reason–because our customers tell us so–to […]


Part 1: Hacking the Movies, Then and Now

When we use the words “hacking” and “movies” in the same sentence, we’re not talking about the Sony incident last year. We’re talking about hacker movies like the upcoming Universal Pictures, Michael Mann production of Blackhat, starring Thor himself. The movie comes out this Friday, and the previews look interesting enough and hopefully the premise and […]


Retail Priorities On Display at NRF’s Big Show

The year of 2014 may have seen the recovery from the Great Recession picking up pace, but from a cybersecurity perspective, it was a rough year to be a retailer. With that in mind, your correspondent attended The Big Show, the annual trade show of the National Retail Federation, to check out the zeitgeist in retail-world […]


Attack Attribution: Looking Back to Look Forward

Part 1 of 2 Lest we see only doom and gloom in the cascade of data breach disclosures, it’s worth acknowledging some of the outstanding work being done on the good guys’ side in the cyber wars. We’re going to take a two-part look at this, starting with some discussion of attack attribution and adversary […]


DomainTools Launches New Flagship Cybersecurity Product

Today I’m very proud to announce the launch of DomainTools Iris Investigate, our new flagship platform for cybersecurity threat investigations. Iris Investigate combines our industry-leading domain and IP ownership data, domain profile data, DNS data, and 15 years of historical Whois and hosting infrastructure data into an intuitive web interface designed around DNS investigation workflows. Three years […]


Profiling malicious domains in The DomainTools Report

At the 2015 RSA Conference in San Francisco, we released the first edition of The DomainTools Report: A Profile of Malicious Domains. In this report, we investigate the attributes of malicious domains connected to malware, spam, phishing, and botnets. Using an aggregation of industry blocklists and DomainTools’ data, we compared the bad actors’ preferences for TLDs, […]


Krebs on DomainTools: A closer look at the Terracotta VPN research

A few days ago, Brian Krebs blogged about a report, published by RSA Research, that uncovered a network of compromised Windows machines being used as VPN exit nodes. The idea was to sell VPN access at premium points across the world to customers within China who needed to bypass the Great Firewall. Compromised machines included […]


This next year promises to be even more exciting than 2015. We will be sure to keep you up to date on our company’s progress, conferences and events, technical topics, industry news and potpourri. If there are any topics you would be interested in, feel free to tweet us at @DomainTools or leave us a comment below.