Product Blog

Expanding one’s business online footprint with the right domain names should not just be left to business decision-makers, but also involve cybersecurity experts. Though old domains can bring benefits to the table, no enterprise wants to end up with those having a sinister past. WHOIS history queries via solutions such as WHOIS History Lookup, Search (from the Domain Research Suite), or API can help avoid that.

How so? Digging into a domain’s WHOIS history allows you to gather more context about its past ownership, including whether it may have belonged to threat actors at some point and should therefore require greater scrutiny.

We compiled a list of domain history no-nos that can put a strain on your ventures’ success (possibly landing your website on blacklists) or even cause harm to whoever might get into contact with them.

Data breaches could cost organizations an average of $3.92 million per incident. The average ransomware payout, on the other hand, stands at $41,198 per occurrence, with the largest payout recorded to date amounting to $1.14 million. It’s essential to be meticulous when it comes to cybersecurity as a seemingly inconsequential hole in an organization’s network could result in millions of dollars’ worth in damages.

Covering every possible attack vector is, therefore, a must for cybersecurity teams, and one attack vector that cybercriminals often use is a domain name. Ransomware, for instance, usually gets injected into a victim’s system through a phishing email that contains a link to a malicious domain. The threat could also unknowingly get dropped onto a victim’s computer when he/she visits an infected website.

Therefore, every aspect of a domain should be inspected, including its WHOIS history records. That way, no stones are left unturned, and one cybersecurity product that could prove useful in this regard is WHOIS History Lookup. This tool allows users to look into the ownership history of a given domain, even before a possible redaction of WHOIS records.

Threat management has grown increasingly complex for most organizations — with more endpoints to secure, new compliance pressures to face, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) to monitor. As a result, several organizations have opted to modify their approach to network security by enlisting the help of managed security service providers (MSSPs).

MSSPs combine different approaches to enhance network reliability, ranging from unified threat management (UTM) to threat intelligence analysis. The majority also implement business continuity (BC) solutions, which are especially crucial in the wake of recent global cyberattacks. To facilitate their programs, they incorporate various tools into their security systems, including traditional firewalls, traffic logs, cyber forensic solutions, and threat data feeds.

The tools that MSSPs use to improve clients’ security posture, however, won’t work without reliable sources of threat intelligence. And that’s where domain information comes in. MSSPs can obtain more insights and data to correlate with internal logs from solutions such as WHOIS History API.

There is a tendency to look at the past to anticipate what the future may hold. The historical performance of financial investment products, for example, is always showcased, although with a disclaimer that they don’t guarantee any future results. Athletes watch past performance of their would-be opponents, so they know what strategies to formulate for the future encounters.

This train of thought is also applicable, at least to some extent, to the field of cybersecurity. Knowing more about past attacks can help security teams strategize and improve their current and future cybersecurity posture.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at how investigating domain registration history through the use of WHOIS History API can help managed detection and response (MDR) teams to anticipate further threats.