DomainTools Blog

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

2013-05-21T17:28:39Z

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.

No matter how long I have been “in this business”, I continue to be awed by the vastness, ingenuity and determination of cybercrime and cybercriminals themselves. It is big business. Cybercrime has many impacts starting with potentially significant financial loss, both to individuals and companies, data and intellectual property loss, brand and reputation damage, and overall network and infrastructure abuse. In 2012, Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) published their annual report which contains a fabulous overview of reported cybercrime such as automobile fraud, extortion scams, scareware tactics and others. It also states reported losses by consumers above $525 million, an increase of 8.3% from 2011 — and those are only the reported losses. IACC claims counterfeiting is a $600 billion a year problem. Any way you look at it, crime is big business.

To combat this trend, security tools have changed. They had to. Fraud detection and prevention must adapt at a very fast pace to keep up with the online criminals’ ever-changing tactics. Entities must protect themselves, their employees, their network and their customers. Rarely does a week go by without some new malware, email phishing scam or counterfeit takedown broadcast in the news.

Organizations are getting smarter through intelligence sharing, leveraging best practices, engaging with social media, and employing the use of big data. Utilizing these various tactics can make it easier to identify suspicious behaviors earlier and monitor ongoing threats more surgically. This is where DomainTools data can be useful: Domain name and IP Whois data can help identify bad actors, either by utilizing Whois history which can often defeat Whois privacy services, or by associating domain names and IP addresses to each other through common variables. DomainTools has the best Whois data, and therefore gives our clients the best chance of finding out who is behind a cybercrime. Our data helps protect companies, networks, employees, customers and internet users worldwide. And we’re just getting started. Later this year DomainTools will be releasing powerful new investigative tools which will set the standard for how whois and DNS data can inform critical cybersecurity efforts across the globe. Stay tuned!

Hack Days at DomainTools

2013-05-21T17:27:03Z

What is a hack day?

For those of you not familiar with the term “hack day”, it’s commonly used among technical professionals when referring to free time at work to focus on something that is outside of your daily, required workload. I can only imagine that the phrase was coined because it started with a bunch of programmers sitting in front of their computers, hacking away at the keyboard (and drinking caffeine) for hours on end to come up with the next big internet sensation. The wonderful part of this concept is that it doesn’t really need to take place in front of a computer anymore or involve writing code.

How does a hack day relate to DomainTools?

Here at DomainTools, we are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to participate in hack days and to be able to fit them interchangeably into the list of the things we, as individuals, are passionate about. This list includes a few obvious concepts – working on challenging problems, collaborating with team members, and expanding our knowledge and our data reach. Then we get to the not-so-obvious (unless you know any of us personally or have read our employee profiles) – eating great food, playing ping-pong, and pulling the perfect espresso shot for a morning/afternoon/evening cup of coffee.

If you could take a screenshot of DomainTools hack days you would see …

*** Day 0 – Preparation ***

All of the employees are anxiously anticipating hack day and have begun scheming quietly to avoid giving away their secrets, finding co-workers to partner with, and collecting necessary supplies so that they’re all ready when the day arrives.

*** Day 1 – Ready, Set, Go! ***

Instead of the loud, bustling, craziness, that you would expect at the beginning of an event we have found that the beginning of a hack day session starts with exactly the opposite reaction. A glimpse around the office on this first day would show the backs of co-workers heads, sound like the rustling of papers or tapping on keyboards, and most likely reveal little to no interaction between people who are not working on projects collectively. Speed, flexibility, and creativity are essential to getting our projects to an ideal state by the time the hack day session is over.

*** Day 2 – The Finish Line Is In Sight ***

Most employees are still focused and fiercely working toward getting something that will show their creativity and hard work in the past days. Others are sharing bits and pieces of their work with co-workers, in hopes that they can get past a writer’s block or confirm that they don’t have any major holes in their designs. At this stage, it’s too late to add anything substantial before the time is up.

*** Day 3 – The Grand Finale ***

On the last day, the energy in the office is high as we scramble to put the finishing touches on our projects. Each project is a way for members of the DomainTools team to show off their creativity and innovative mindset. The creators of each project are given 10 minutes to present their work to the rest of the team, solicit feedback and sell their project as the next big thing at DomainTools. Best of awards are voted on by the team members to have a project bubble to the top in certain categories. The amount of passion that is put into each project is absolutely amazing. Watching team members talk excitedly about what they accomplished or what they wanted to accomplish shows their dedication to their work and their desire to push the boundaries on what is possible in this problem space.

Closing Thoughts

I hope the majority of you will have the chance to experience this kind of collaborative environment at some point in your careers because it really feels awesome to get your ideas and inventions out on the table. Stay tuned for some of our hack day projects as they make their debut in the next couple of months.

We would love to hear what you would scheme up for a DomainTools hack day if you had the opportunity. So please feel free to share your thoughts as comments on this blog posting!

Analysis of .PW Domain Registrations One Month After Launch

2013-05-14T16:17:20Z

The launch of .PW has received a great deal of attention because it can indicate the kind of reception new gTLDs may receive. The .PW registry operators were delighted to reach 50,000 domain registrations within only 3 weeks of general availability. With their goal for the year of 100,000 registrations, they appear to be well on their way. We congratulate their success.

We were curious what might be driving the registrations of .PW. To find out, we researched the geographic distribution of domain registrations based on NameServer information. We identified Nameserver data on 63,736 .PW domains to find the top NameServer domains and hosting countries. While our list of domains is not complete, we feel it is a large enough sample. Here’s what we found:

The top 3 Nameservers all belong to companies apparently doing business in China.

TOP TEN NAMESERVER DOMAINS, BY DOMAIN COUNT

Looking at the geolocation of the NameServer IPs, the influence of registrations from the Chinese market is even more clear:

TOP TEN NAMESERVER HOSTING COUNTRIES

(NOTE: You may notice that these totals add up over 63,736. Domains often have more than one Nameserver hostname, and each Nameserver hostname may have multiple IP addresses. A domain may have geographically distributed Nameservers. For each domain, we count the country once, regardless of the number of Nameserver IPs in that country)

While .PW seems to be doing well in many markets, the strong growth of .PW domains appears to be driven primarily by Chinese partners which prominently promote .pw to their users. To illustrate, the company XinNet.com (which manages the #2 .PW Nameserver xincache.com) promotes .pw registrations on its homepage and offers it at a lower price than other TLDs.

Lastly, we also analyzed the composition of the domain names to see if there were any patterns. Interestingly, nearly 25% of the registrations contain at least one numeric character. Compare that with less than 7% of domains overall.

After looking at this data, our takeaways are:

1      .PW domains appear to be doing extremely well in the Chinese market.
2      New gTLDs will benefit from strong registrar partnerships, and low pricing.
3      Numerical character domains may be very popular early registrations in new gTLDs, at least those that expect to have a strong Chinese user base.

DomainTools on the Road

2013-05-01T16:26:52Z

This May is a busy month for DomainTools! We’re exhibiting at three conferences this month (back to back) that are specific to the financial services, anti-counterfeiting and trademark audiences.

DomainTools will be talking to conference attendees about their current business needs and how our products and latest innovations can be used as critical ingredients to their threat investigation and mitigation work— such as Domain Report, Reverse Whois, Screenshots, Brand Monitor and custom enterprise account options.

We’re looking forward to connecting with current members and answering questions for anyone who is thinking about becoming a DomainTools member!

Come visit our booths and grab some nice schwag:

FS-ISAC — April 28 – May 1, Marriot Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

IACC — May 1-3, Marriot City Center in Dallas, Texas.

INTA — May 4-13, Dallas Convention Center in Dallas, Texas.

5 Things To Know About Managing Your Domain Information

2013-04-30T20:39:15Z

All too often the Support Team here at DomainTools receives disconcerting stories from registrants who have no control over their domain names or websites. What is entirely surprising is how many registrants shift control of their business’ domain and/or website to outside resources without building a solid understanding as to how to manage their own domain assets.

With many trustworthy Registrars in today’s domain registration marketplace, with their volumes of Help and Support knowledge resources, it is mind boggling at times that people still blindly trust others to handle what may very well be one of their most crucial business decisions.

I have found that there are five basic tips that can be useful, to even the most novice domain registrants:

1. Registering your own domain name is simple. If you sign up for Facebook, you can create a user account at a Registrar of your choice. The information fields you will be asked to fill out are pretty basic and take only minutes to fill out. You should expect a confirmation email in order to verify your account. Again this is a fairly standard protocol in today’s online world. The verification email is also a great way to become familiar with how your registrar contacts you and so you can add them to any ‘safe’ lists you may have. This will ensure that you don’t miss any important communications from them during the registration lifecycle. Help and Support information links are usually provided with these communications as well.

2. Don’t let anyone else register your own domain name. Avoid the “I let my sister’s, in-law’s, brother’s aunt whose son’s girlfriend’s, sisters hair dressers, cousin who work down at the docks and dabbles in web design, register my domain name” scenario. Friends and family are great, don’t get me wrong. However, YOU should be the point of contact managing your domain assets. DomainTools receives at least half a dozen inquiries each day from registrants trying to access or reclaim their names because they allowed someone else to register it. One day a registrant is communicating with their ‘web person’ then the next they have disappeared into thin air, leaving them with no access or ability to manage their domain asset. By choosing to use one of the more popular or well known domain registration providers you can rest assured that they will be there when you need them. Many have 24 hour online and phone support and likely live chat with a real customer service representative.

3. Understand the WHOIS requirements. All ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) accredited registries must comply with the WHOIS database requirements. As such, when you register a domain name, ICANN requires your domain name registrar to submit your personal information to the WHOIS database. Once your listing appears in the online directory, it is publicly available to anyone who chooses to check it using a WHOIS search tool such as DomainTools. ICANN does a very thorough job of providing information on Registrant Rights & Responsibilities.

4. WHOIS privacy services are available to every Registrant. There is no disputing the potential risk of falling victim to hackers, spammers or other nefarious players by having your personal information made publicly available. However, you (and other registrants) should know the may absolutely use a privacy protection service to mask their public WHOIS data details. Most of the major registrars offer privacy services and if registrants. Not sure if your own registrar does? Ask and find out.

5. Get peace of mind through multi-year registrations. Just before submitting the final check out button to pay for your domain name purchase, many Registrars will offer you the opportunity to register the domain name for multiple years. This may seem like an upsell but in fact this is an opportunity for the registrant to lock in their name for years to come. Many will offer 2, 3, 4, or 5 years registration. The main benefit is that you will not have to worry about the yearly renewals and the possibility of missing the notification. If you decide to choose the single year option, a domain-monitoring tool such as Domain Monitor from DomainTools can be a handy tool in your management ‘tool box’. Access to Domain Monitor is free with a Novice account from DomainTools.

5 Tips for Developing a Competitive Intelligence Strategy Using DomainTools

2013-04-25T22:55:48Z

As a marketer, I rely on a wide range of tools every day to track campaign ROI and gain insight into the health and impact of the various DomainTools marketing programs I run. Some of the tools I use (such as Twitter, ExactTarget, Facebook, and LinkedIn) provide their own metrics based on number of visits, specific content impressions/shares, overall engagement numbers, etc.

In addition to monitoring the pulse of current programs, it’s also very important to research and monitor what is developing in the market so you know how to best position your company.

Specifically, what are your competitors planning? Do they have upcoming product plans or launches in the near future? What does that larger strategy look like? What programs or promotions have they ran in the past, in addition to current offers?

How are you currently uncovering this information?

Before joining DomainTools, I wasn’t tapped into the fact that you can leverage domain name data to bolster your competitive intelligence. Here are 5 tips you can use to keep tabs on what different companies are up to in the marketplace —whether you’re a marketer, movie or gaming buff, CEO, product manager. Or, keep tabs on certain companies just for fun!

1. Monitor your trademarks/brand AND know when your competitors register new domains with Brand Monitor email alerts. You’ll get notified every time DomainTools discovers a domain name registration that includes an exact match with a brand name, trademark term, or other text string you indicate. This will help with you with proactively approach competitive planning.

2. See how your competitor’s website homepage has changed over time using Screenshots.com. You can see how the brand has evolved, how promotions changed, and uncover other key information.

3. Understand your competitor’s entire domain portfolio. As long as you have a key piece of information (name, address, phone number, for example), you will be able to uncover all the domain names associated with the specific piece of information you shared using the Reverse Whois tool. From the tally of domain names, you’ll gain a clearer picture of the company’s brand positioning and product plans (if there’s a domain name you weren’t aware of / isn’t built out yet).

4. After reviewing your competitor’s domain name Whois records, you may want to keep an eye on a specific registrant so you can be notified via email whenever a person or company registers a new domain, has one transferred to them, or transfers a domain out of their control.

5. If you’d like ALL of the competitive information listed above, available in a simple PDF report, Domain Report makes it simple. You’ll get a complete picture of your competitor’s current website’s lifeline including historical screenshots, historical Whois records, nameserver, registrar and IP address changes.

If you’re a DomainTools professional member, be sure to take advantage of all of these tools in addition to Reverse Whois and Domain Report!

Rate Limiting with Redis

2013-04-09T21:02:10Z

We use different forms of rate limiting throughout DomainTools. Common use cases are detecting abusive actors trying to scrape our data and limiting requests to external services to avoid placing any undue load.

I have seen and used many different algorithms for rate limiting requests but none of which met the requirements for a project I was recently working on. These requirements being strict limits avoiding time boundary issues, multiple limit rules, manual blocks, and a distributed architecture so that multiple systems can use it concurrently.

The first problem I see with a lot of algorithms is how they handle time boundaries. For example, lets say we wanted to limit to 20 requests per minute. We could increment a counter when we make a request and clear this count at the start of every new minute. If the counter is at 20 and we want to make another request, this would be over our limit. This appears to do the right thing as we would average only 20 requests per minute. The problem with this simple algorithm is that it is possible to make 20 requests in the last second of a given minute, and another 20 in the first second of the next. 40 requests in 2 seconds. I need something where we never make more than 20 requests in a sliding 60 second window.

To minimize this effect, you can use more time buckets for a higher resolution but then counting requests back days or longer will require a large number of buckets.

Token or Leaky buckets will also allow you to limit to an average of 20 requests per minute but allow bursts of traffic after a period of inactivity.

I also needed more sophisticated limit rules. I may want to limit to 800 requests daily, but I do not want a burst of 800 requests in the first minute of that day. What I want was to define multiple limit rules which work together. Say let a maximum of 1 request through per second, 20 per minute, 200 per hour, and 800 per day.

Rate limiting solution: Redis

The Redis datastore was an obvious choice to implement my own version of a rate limiter:

It is extremely fast, persistent, and is a lot more than just a simple key/value store.
The algorithm and data structure I chose was straightforward.
I keep a timestamp log of requests in a Redis list data type which allows fast appending and trimming of elements.

As an example, I will use the table below to show the timestamps of five previous requests.

Requests ago	1	2	3	4	5
Timestamp	12:34:28	12:34:26	12:34:14	12:33:37	12:33:35

If I have two rules of 1 per second and 5 per minute, I grab the 1st and 5th timestamps representing the last request and 5 requests ago.

If the 1st timestamp is less than 1 second old the first rate limit rule will fail. Likewise if the 5th timestamp is less than 1 minute old the second rule fails.

At 12:34:31 the first timestamp is 3 seconds old, but the 5th timestamp is only 56 seconds old triggering the second rule. We could calculate we need to wait 4 seconds before trying again.

At 12:34:40 the first rule passes as it is 12 seconds old, the second rule also passes as it is now 65 seconds old.

We can then allow the request and append the current time to the timestamp log.

As we never look past the 5th request to check our two rules, we can trim the list to 5 elements. The maximum time we need to keep requests is 1 minute from the longest limit rule, so this is what I set the time to live. If we never use this list again, it will drop out of the database after 60 seconds trimming the dataset of unnecessary entries.

After inserting our new timestamp the redis list now looks like this.

Requests ago	1	2	3	4	5
Timestamp	12:34:40	12:34:28	12:34:26	12:34:14	12:33:37

We store a large number of these timestamp lists in our redis store, all referenced by user definable keys. This allows us to track a large number of requests independently.

To give an indication on how this will scale, I use this to track over 100,000 timestamp logs averaging 60 requests in each list. Timestamp logs are kept for one day and the redis server sits easily in a few hundred MB of RAM.

I have made a Python implementation of this algorithm available on GitHub at https://github.com/DomainTools/rate-limit

Intrigued by this blog post? Good news…DomainTools is looking for talent to join our engineering team! Check out our Python Engineer position and see our other DomainTools openings here.

It’s Raining Domains in Spain!

2013-04-02T16:55:17Z

Dietmar Stefitz and Jodi Chamberlain are once again putting on their Domaining Spain conference April 25-27 in Valencia, Spain. DomainTools is proud to sponsor this Europe-focused domain event as we expand many of our products in 2013 to cover ccTLDs and of course all new gTLDs. Our very own James Morfopoulos will be speaking at the event so be sure to find him if you are attending!

Many DomainTools products have always covered all TLDs, including Whois, Whois History, Reverse Whois, Reverse IP and Registrant Monitor. This year we are expanding other heavily used products to also cover all ccTLDs as well as new gTLDs. In February we released an updated Brand Monitor product to alert brand and trademark owners when new domains get registered with their trademark strings across the 50 largest TLDs worldwide. Throughout the course of 2013 other products will get similar updates.

DomainTools also has products available for new gTLD Registries and Registrars. In late 2012 we launched a whitelabel whois product whereby DomainTools can power the whois lookups on new gTLD Registry websites. See whois.sx as an example. Also important to both Registries and Registrars is effective domain name suggestion technology. DomainTools was a pioneer in so-called ‘namespinning’ over 10 years ago with our core Domain Suggestions tool. in 2012 we invested in a brand new namespinner algorithm, available in beta form here: namespinning.com. Both of these namespinning technologies are available via API to affiliate partners.

New gTLDs are going to change the face of the DNS forever. For those paying attention, the accelerating growth in ccTLDs has been doing this for years. If you want to learn more about how these landmark changes will affect your business, we highly recommend attending Domaining Spain. If you have any questions on how DomainTools can help you take advantage of related opportunities, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Game Changers

2013-03-25T17:42:45Z

I’m a very casual student of history and I’ve always enjoyed thinking about “game changers”. Throughout all of human history, we have been inventors. From fire, to the wheel, to electricity, to the computer, to the Internet, our inventions have changed (and often disrupted) our cultures and the world.

In the last 100 years, I think the electric lights, radio and television, aviation, and the Internet have been the biggest game changers.

Although invented in the 1870s, it was the widespread use of electric lights in the early 1900s that really changed the world. It meant safe illumination that wouldn’t explode or burn the house down like gas lamps or candles. The English language has had to add words like ”nightlife” and “night shift”. Electric lights make us feel safe at night. Electric lights meant that our days were no longer bounded by sunrise and sunset.

The first public radio broadcast in 1910 was several opera signers. Along with television, both changed the way we think about the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats (both on radio and TV) helped Americans through the Great Depression and World War II. They brought the greater world into living rooms and bedrooms. Fashion, politics, and water cooler conversations all revolved around the messages on radio and television. Radio and television meant that we could learn about and react to something happening anywhere the world as it happened.

The Wright brothers first flew in 1904, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that commercial aviation really took off. In 1879, Jules Verne wrote ”Around the world in 80 days”. In 2012, Flightfox.com showed us how to travel around the world visiting 6 continents for at least 48 hours each for less than $3000. Aviation allows FedEx and UPS to deliver a package to almost any spot in the world in 24 hours. If radio and television told us what was happening anywhere in the world, aviation allows us to get up and go do something about it.

In the world of Information Technology, there have also been game changers. Today, in less than a second, our systems receive a request for a whois page, look up all of the details, compose a response, and ship it to the browser. During peak hours, our servers will answer over a thousand requests every second. We track over 215 million active domains and have over 5 billion curent and historical whois records. It’s no trivial feat to reliably deliver that content quickly.

For DomainTools, the game changers have been large memory systems, solid state drives, and virtual systems.

10 years ago, it was very very expensive to buy a server with more than 4 gigabytes of memory. With improvements in manufacturing and memory technology, it’s easy to buy systems with 256 gigabytes or more of memory. DomainTools uses a number of servers with huge amounts of memory to hold the entire index of all of the whois records in memory. It would be very difficult to answer a thousand requests per second quickly and cost effectively.

From the beginning, DomainTools used MySQL to hold most of it’s data. At first it was 10s of gigabytes to hold everything. Today, it’s terrabytes. Two years ago, we were approaching the breaking point of keeping our MySQL databases on hard drives. The spinning platters of the hard drive simply could not keep up with our needs. We faced a tough decision to either figure out how to make MySQL faster or change our software to use something else. We ended up testing SSDs and the effect was incredible. Despite the high cost, the SSDs were 100x faster than the hard drives and it bought us time to explore other technologies and techniques. Today, we use more SSDs than hard drives.

When DomainTools started, as a small company, every server was precious. Every server had to do multiple roles in order to keep the bottom line in the black. Back in 2007, the cost of keeping our operating systems upgraded was getting to be too high. The problem was that if a server had a MySQL database, an Apache web server, a PHP application, and a Ruby application, it was trickly to upgrade all of them without conflict. For those who lived through those days, the ”expat” library was the worst offender. We made a hard decision to try out virtual systems. First with VM Ware, and later the OpenVZ, the results were awesome and we have not looked back. Over the last three years, we have upgraded almost all of our systems to virtual systems. We have fewer hardware nodes, so our co-location costs are lower. We use the processors we have more efficiently. And lastly, every virtual server does exactly one thing, so the “cost” of keeping our systems up-to-date is much lower.

I’m sure there are folks out there who disagree on the three biggest technological changes over the last 100 years or in the IT world. I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories on the technologies that were game changers for you.

DomainTools Whois History, Reverse IP, Brand Monitor and Registrant Alert as Daily Business Tools

2013-03-12T16:49:45Z

Author Bio: Peter Mead
I’m Peter Mead, and I am a Web Consultant. My business is called Peter Mead iT and I offer personalized WordPress Design and specialized SEO solutions with a strong focus on Web Strategy. I also work with buying and selling websites and online business opportunities. I live near Melbourne, Australia and I service clients both from Australia and in the USA at this time.

Website: http://petermeadit.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/petermeadit
Facebook:http://facebook.com/petermeadit

How I Found Out About DomainTools And Won a Great Client

I first came across DomainTools through a close colleague of mine who owns Australia’s domain name trading forum, DNTrade.com.au. He loaded up DomainTools.com on his PC in the office one night. I was firstly struck by how fast it ran and the depth of the data it returned.

I signed up for a free account thinking “Yeah, I look up domain name information dozens of times every day, so if it is good, I will buy a PRO account.” I am always happy to pay for good tools, after all, professionals are as good as their tools right?

I immediately put my DomainTools account to good use while troubleshooting a website for a potential client. She was not sure what had happened, but her website went offline and she could not figure out why. I did not have access to her hosting account so I could not access the domain name records directly to troubleshoot the problem. So, I started with the good old Whois lookup, which of course displayed name server records, amongst many other DomainTools specific details. I could identify that the name servers were set incorrectly for her website. She is now a great client of mine.

At this point I was hooked on DomainTools and I started looking to tell my clients and followers about DomainTools, via Twitter and Facebook.

Every Day Use of Domain Search, Domain Suggestions, Reverse IP, and Whois History

I went along and met the awesome guys and gals at Flippa.com in Melbourne. They showed us some pretty cool data on how Websites on Flippa make money. This really went a long way to explaining niche trends that are working. So, I went to the office and I logged into my PRO account. I used the Domain Search and Domain Suggestions tools, then registered a bunch of names that I was able to derive from high value keywords, through refining my searches, removing hyphens from the names, and putting keywords at the start of the name and so on.

I now login to my PRO account every day to check on domain name records. A good example of this is when I am checking the Flippa.com listings. I will run a Whois History check to see how long the current owner has had the domain for and who owned it before they did, how many times it has changed hands. Also useful is the Reverse IP for verifying how many other names are on that IP.

Monitoring Brand Terms with Brand Monitor and Domain Status with Domain Monitor

Using Brand Monitor is, I find, a great way that I can protect my clients’ products and trademarks IP. I enter the text string that I want to monitor so that I can capture all new domains registered with my brand in them. Next I enter any ‘Exclude Terms’ to avoid false positives for common terms that are not related. I want to monitor new domains, as this is a great advantage for my clients. Getting visibility into newly registered domain information allows me to make recommendations to my clients. This is also extremely insightful as it aids with decisions around what brands and domain names to invest in.

I also use the Domain Monitor as a sort fail-safe for expired domains. When a client forgets to renew and the domain goes into redemption, I can receive an alert and then renew the domain while there is still time. This is a very useful option which adds to the services I provide. Also, with a bit of imagination, you can see some other pretty strategic reasons to find about about expired domains for specific brands.

What other uses do you get from these tools? I’d be interested to hear from others using DomainTools’ Whois History to check on domain names prior to purchasing.