How a veteran cyber crime investigator proves domain ownership with Whoisology!
We created Whoisology with the main aim to provide an easy-to-use tool for professionals to get a holistic picture of an online entity. For any online investigation, a single piece of information of an adversary, be it a domain name, registrant name, a phone number or any term in the Whois record, is insignificant even by itself, but by understanding its connections or delving into its history, even greater insights can be gained. Our system’s advanced technologies coupled with the best data-set allows you to reduce the time-consuming and tedious task of finding associations to just a few clicks!
Because of the powerful domain Intel our tool provides, professionals keep telling us of how Whoisology has helped them in investigating cyber crime, gathering corporate intelligence, researching for legal purposes or even for business development. In order to show how Whoisology has actually been helpful, we are sharing a podcast of a very well-known figure in the cyber security world, Mr. Michael Bazzell, who has spent 18 years as a government computer crime investigator primarily majoring in open source intelligence, cyber crime cases, and personal data removal methods.
In the first half of the podcast, he talks about the growing crime of sextortion and digitally manipulated pornography, citing a recent case of his client facing a leaked fake porn image issue. He goes on to share his insights about these growing online services that facilitate fake pornography, the role artificial intelligence could play in making this worse and the threats that he foresees in the future if things continue as they are. He then moves on to discussing his encounter with the recent Albine/Blur data breach and talks about his use of this data masking service for protecting his crucial information which, ironically, got breached at their own end! With some preventive measures that he had taken and which, as a matter of fact, can be taken by anyone, he proves that we can make ourselves less vulnerable to bad actors.
In the other half, he talks about another client’s case of domain hijacking. He shares fascinating insights of how he helped create evidence for his client, a mid-sized online business, whose domain name was targeted (rather hijacked) by his own IT manager, an ex-employee. With the help of historical domain information right from the first time the domain was registered and by using the rebuffed IT manager’s email address to find other similar domain names owned by him, investigators were able to put together pieces of information using Whoislogy to create enough proof for at least claiming domain ownership back from the host (registrar). It is indeed great to know Mr. Michael Bazzell’s thought process and to understand the steps that domain owners or security professionals can take to protect and investigate websites with various features from Whoisology, be it the history of a domain, connections by attributes like email address or name, wild card searches with partial information, to name a few.
You can hear the entire podcast by following the link below:
https://soundcloud.com/user-98066669/106-blur-breach-fake-porn-domain-histories