Some less-trivial breakthroughs:
- finding 2013 DNS Census
- CGI comms characterization
- secure subdomain search on 2013 DNS Census let to a few hits
- 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches was massive and led to many new ranges
Grepping the 2013 DNS Census first by overused CGI comms subdomains
secure.
and ssl.
leaves 200k lines. Grepping for the overused "news" led to hits:- secure.worldnewsandent.com,2012-02-13T21:28:15,208.254.40.117
- ssl.beyondnetworknews.com,2012-02-13T20:10:13,66.104.175.40
Also tried but failed:
sports
:- secure.motorsportdealers.com,2012-04-10T20:19:09,64.73.117.38 web.archive.org/web/20110501000000*/motorsportdealers.com
OK, after the initial successes in New results: only one...
secure.
, we went a bit more data intensive:- took all
secure.*
ssl.*
URLs in the 2013 DNS Census, 70k entries - cleaned up a bit, e.g. only
.com
or.net
. this left only, 30k entries only - lopped over all of them in archive CDX: Wayback Machine CDX scanning, searching for those that also end in
.cgi
web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=$domain&matchType=domain&filter=urlkey:.*.cgi&to=20140101000000. Took an afternoon, but no rate limit block. - this leaves about 1000, so we loop over all of them manually on web archive with a script, and opened any that had the pattern of very vew hits between 2010 and 2013 only, and on those check for visual/thematic style match. Careful not to make more than 15 requests per minute or else 5 min blacklist!
- 208.254.42.205 secure.driversinternationalgolf.com,2012-02-13T10:42:20,
After 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches we later understood why there were so few hits here: the 2013 DNS Census didn't capture the
secure.
subdomains of many domains it had for some reason. Shame, because if it had, this method would have yielded many more results.Starting at twitter.com/shakirov2036/status/1746729471778988499, Russian expat Oleg Shakirov comments "Let me know if you are still looking for the Carson website".
He then proceeded to give Carson and 5 other domains in private communication. His name is given here with his consent. His advances besides not being blind were Yandexing for some of the known hits which led to pages that contained other hits:
- moyistochnikonlaynovykhigr.com contains a copy of myonlinegamesource.com, and both are present at www.seomastering.com/audit/pefl.ru/, an SEO tracker, because both have backlinks to
pefl.ru
, which is apparently a niche fantasy football website - 4 previously unknown hits from: "Mass Deface III" pastebin. He missed one which Ciro then found after inspecting all URLs on Wayback Machine, so leading to a total of 5 new hits from that source.
Unfortunately, these methods are not very generalizable, and didn't lead to a large number of other hits. But every domain counts!
Edit: Carson was found Oleg Shakirov's findingsby Oleg Shakirov:
alljohnny.com
, communicated at: twitter.com/shakirov2036/status/1746729471778988499, earliest archive from 2004 (!): web.archive.org/web/20040113025122/http://alljohnny.com/, The domain was hidden in plain sight, it was present in a not very visible watermark visible in the Reuters article screenshot! The watermark was added to the CIA to the background image, it is actually present on the website. In retrospect, it was actually present at on the expired domain trackers dataset, but the mega discrete all
second word made Ciro Santilli miss it: github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2015/blob/9d504f3b85364a64f7db93311e70011344cff788/07/05/02#L1572What follows is the previous
The fact that the Reuters article has a screenshot of it, and therefore a Wayback Machine link, plus the specificity of the website topic, will likely keep Ciro awake at night for a while until someone finds that domain.
Some text visible on the Reuters screenshot:It is unclear however if this text is plaintext or part of a an image.
Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show
Your Favorite Host and Comedic Genius
Submit Your Favorite Carson Moment
Heeere's Johnny!
Holy crap, the "Here's Johnny" line from The Shining (1980) is a reference to Johnny Carson: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDpipB4yehk, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYnyPAkgyvc, Ciro never knew that... but every American would have understood it at the time.
Some failed attempts, either dry guesses or from DNS grepping dataset searches:
- johnnycarson.com: official
- johnnycarson.net: fan site: web.archive.org/web/20010501225614/http://johnnycarson.net/
- johnnycarsontonight.com
- carson-johnny.com: legit
- johnnycarsonshow.com: web.archive.org/web/20110208005558/http://johnnycarsonshow.com/captcha/index.php?d=johnnycarsonshow.com your IP has been blocked
- tributetojohnnycarson.com: only one archive web.archive.org/web/20180805132430/http://tributetojohnnycarson.com/
- bestofjohnnycarson.com: web.archive.org/web/20130525035938/http://bestofjohnnycarson.com/ Lived past 2013.
- bestofjohnny.com/: web.archive.org/web/20130506011824/http://bestofjohnny.com/ empty
- johnnycarsonvideo.com: dead early 2000s web.archive.org/web/20130605152818/http://johnnycarsonvideo.com/
- johnnycarsontv.com: web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/johnnycarsontv.com
- thejohnnycarsonshow.com: web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/thejohnnycarsonshow.com
- carsonsbest.com: web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/carsonsbest.com
- johnnycarsonfans.com: web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/johnnycarsonfans.com
- web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/carsonified.com
- night:
- amazing:
- johnnyamazing.com: broken archives: web.archive.org/web/*/http://johnnyamazing.com/*
- carson
- johnneycarson.com: no archives
- johnnycarson.co: no archives
- johnnycarsons.info
- johnnycarsons.com
- johnnycarson.org
- johnnycarsonsdesk.com
- johnny-carson-video.com
- johnnycarsondvd.org
- johnnycarsondvds.org
- johnnycarsondvd.net
- johnnycarsondvd.tv
- johnnycarsondvds.net
- johnnycarsondvds.tv
- johnnycarson.tv
- johnnyguitarcarson.com
- johnnycarsonmovie.com
- hookedonjohnnycarson.com
- johnnycarsonbook.com
- licensingjohnnycarson.com
- johnnnycarson.com
- johnnycarson360.com
- koalajohnnycarson.com
- johnny-carson.com
- johnnycarsonbirthplace.com
- johnnycarsonbirthplace.net
- johnny:
- heres:
- heresjohnnyfilm.com: web.archive.org/web/20131011115733/http://www.heresjohnnyfilm.com/ legit
- hereisjohnny.net: no archives
- heresjohnnyradioshow.com: web.archive.org/web/20130509042107/http://heresjohnnyradioshow.com/, Legit most likely: web.archive.org/web/20140517103512/http://heresjohnnyradioshow.com/
- wherejohnnylives.net: broken archives
- heresjohnny.com: squat web.archive.org/web/20130607145841/http://heresjohnny.com/ Many other TlD like .net, .co.uk
- heeeeresjohnny.com: web.archive.org/web/20130612211448/http://heeeeresjohnny.com/: legit
- night:
- johnnylatenight.com: web.archive.org/web/20150801132622/http://johnnylatenight.com/ Legit broken
- web.archive.org/web/20110208161513/http://www.johnnysnight.com/
- heres:
- johnnycarson.org: squatted past 2013, nothing before
- carsonshow.com: squat: web.archive.org/web/20110224211714/http://carsonshow.com/
- tonightshow247.net: web.archive.org/web/20101226190209/http://tonightshow247.net/: squat
- tonightshow.tv: web.archive.org/web/20141221222442/http://www.tonightshow.tv/: legit
Searching the Wayback Machine proved fruitless. There is no full text search: Wayback Machine full text search, and a heuristic web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/Johnny%20Carson search has relevant hits but not the one we want.
Another attempt was to search for "carson" on webmasterhome.cn which lists expired domains in bulk by expiration day, and it search engine friendly. It contains most of the domains we've found so far. Google either doesn't support partial word search or requires you to be a God to find it
so we settle for DuckDuckGo which supports it: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22&t=h_&ia=web Adding years also helps: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22+2011&ia=web with this we might be getting all possible results. Ciro went through all in 2011, 2012 and 2013 but no luck. Also fuck en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_City,_Nevada and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson,_California :-)
Let's search tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "carson" contained in any historic domain name. 10,001 lines. Grepping those, no good Wayback machine hits for those that also contain "johnny" or "show". Data at: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tools.whoisxmlapi.com_reverse-whois-search_carson.csv in case anyone want to try and dig...
Let's also search the fortuitously timed 2013 DNS Census.
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