It should come as no surprise that a small film franchise by the name of “Star Wars” recently released some snippets from the upcoming film “Episode VII: The Force Awakens”. If you have not seen the trailer, it comes highly recommended. Naturally DomainTools’ reaction to the trailer was a mixture of sheer delight and curiosity surrounding the volume of registered Star Wars themed domain names. In order to help satisfy this curiosity, I went ahead and leveraged our Domain Search tool to look at the quantity (and quality) of popular Star Wars-themed domains.
The Research
Through my Star Wars domain research I searched 26 unique Star Wars references. The full list includes a mix of characters from all episodes (including the newest film), popular droids, weapons, and spaceships. As you can imagine, outside of a multitude of TLDs, there were also countless spoofs; therefore, I am quantifying popularity by sheer volume rather than by exact match domain names. Without further ado here is a quick look at “popularity” by volume. Yoda has a clear monopoly, followed by the Death Star, Stormtrooper, and Light Saber:
Another important category in this domain search was, not so surprisingly, the most humorous spoofs. Here are our top five:
- thehansolocup[.]com
- chewbaccalypse[.]com
- guitar2-d2[.]com
- alf-vs-darthvader[.]pp[.]ua
- ipyoda[.]com
Final Observations
Throughout my domain search there were a few patterns. A majority of domains were parked, so there is lots of opportunity for you Star Wars domain fanatics out there! Secondly, in 90% of searches there was a clear domain equation of the character + costume and character + credit card (i.e. princessleiacostume[.]com, darthvadercreditcard[.]net). It is important to note that domains that are blatant spoofs of brands can quickly escalate to trademark violations. If, however, your domain is clearly satirical and/or a fan site you are likely in the clear. Finally, I reviewed the Whois data from theforceawakens.com and found the domain was registered by Disney back in June of 2014. This is interesting, as filming commenced in April of 2014, so it appears Disney was keeping a close lid on the film title. Moving forward, I’ll be leveraging a monitor on this particular registrant to see if we can’t gather some interesting information on Episode 8. If you are interested in any other Star Wars cyber security connection, I recommend you check out this article that outlines Key Lessons for the Galactic Empire on Cyber Security. May the force be with you in your cyber quest!
