Here we list of suspected domains for which the correct IP was apparently not found since there are no neighbouring hits.
These are suspicious, and suggest either that we didn't obtain the correct reverse IP, or a change in CIA methodology from an older time at which they were not yet using the obscene IP ranges.
For example, in the case of inews-today.com, 2013 DNS Census gave one IP 193.203.49.212, but then viewdns.info gave another one 66.175.106.146 which fit into an existing IP range, and which assumed to be the correct IP of interest.
A similar case happened when we found IP 212.209.74.126 for headlines2day.com with dnshistory.org: dnshistory.org/historical-dns-records/a/headlines2day.com.
It is also possible that some of them are simply false positives so they should be taken with a grain of salt. Further reverse engineering e.g. of comms or HTML analysis might be able to exclude some of them.
It is interesting to note that Reuters seems to have featured disproportionately many hits from that range, one wonders why that happened. It is possible that they chose these because they actually didn't have any nearby hits to give away less obvious information, though they did pick some from the ranges as wel.
In what follows we list the domains with possible reverse IPs and what was explored so far for each. We consider IPs not in a range to be uncertain, and that instead their domains might have been previously in a range which we
dailynewsandsports.com. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches
  • 216.119.129.94. rdns source: viewdns.info "location": "United States", "owner": "A2 Hosting, Inc.", "lastseen": "2012-04-13". Tested viewdns.info range: 216.119.129.85 - 216.119.129.86, 216.119.129.89 - 216.119.129.99, ran out of queries for 87 and 88
    • 216.119.129.90: eastdairies.com 2011-04-04. Promising name and date, but no archives alas.
    • 216.119.129.97: miideaco.com 2016-02-01
  • 216.119.129.114 Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches, also present on viewdns.info but at a later date from previous "location": "United States", "owner": "A2 Hosting, Inc.", "lastseen": "2013-11-29". Tested viewdns.info range: 216.119.129.109 - 216.119.129.119
    • 216.119.129.110: dommoejmechty.com.ua. Legit.
    • 216.119.129.111: dailybeatz.com: Legit
    • 216.119.129.113:
      • audreygeneve.com
      • reyzheng.com
      • jacintorey.com
    • 216.119.129.114: dailynewsandsports.com. hit.
    • 216.119.129.115: afxchange.com legit/broken
    • 216.119.129.116: danafunkfinancial.com: legit
  • 208.73.33.194 on securitytrails.com
iranfootballsource.com:
iraniangoalkicks.com:
iraniangoals.com:
football-enthusiast.com:
  • 212.4.18.14: Tested viewdns.info range: 212.4.18.1 - 212.4.18.29. This is a curious case, rather close to 212.4.18.129 sightseeingnews.com, but not quite in the same range apparently. Viewdns.info also agrees on its history with only "212.4.18.14", "location" : "Milan - Italy", "owner" : "MCI Worldcom Italy Spa", "lastseen" : "2013-06-30" of interest.
cyhiraeth-intlnews.com:
europeannewsflash.com:
outlooknewscast.com:
farsi-newsandweather.com:
global-view-news.com:
health-men-today.com:
firstnewssource.com:
pars-technews.com:
newdaynewsonline.com:
sportsnewsfinder.com:
newsworldsite.com:
todaysnewsreports.net:
hassannews.net:
todayoutdoors.com:
globaltourist.net:
terrain-news.com:
intlnewsdaily.com
opensourcenewstoday.com:
All IP ranges have some holes in them for which we don't have a domain name.
It is because there was nothing there, or just because we don't have a good enough reverse IP database?
It is possible that DomainTools could help with a more complete database, but its access is extremely expensive and out of reach at the moment.
Censys is another option that would be good to try.
Putting 140 USD into WhoisXMLAPI to get all whois histories of interest for possible reverse searches would also be of interest.
It can't be HTML crawl because presumably there wouldn't have been links to those websites? Presumably this is why Common Crawl doesn't seem to have any hits.
So they must have had some kind of DNS A record database?
Or would IPv4 sweep have worked, without the Host header with the CIA's setup?
The same question also applies to the 2013 DNS Census. It has less hits, but still has many.
Whatever they did, we are so so glad that they did!
.com and .net are very dominant. Here we list other choices made:
  • .info: has a few hits:
    • archived comms:
      • beyondthefringe.info
    • unarchived comms:
      • crickettoday.info
    • unarchived:
      • talkingpointnews.info
      • theventurenews.info
      • worldconcerns.info
    Did a full Wayback Machine CDX scanning on .info after:
    grep -e news -e noticias -e nouvelles -e world -e global
    That makes about 10k domains, so it's about the right size.
  • .org: has a least one hit, see: Are there .org hits?
  • .biz:
    • unarchived comms:
      • atthemovies.biz
Previously it was unclear if there were any .org hits, until we found the first one with clear comms: web.archive.org/web/20110624203548/http://awfaoi.org/hand.jar
Later on, two more clear ones were found with expired domain trackers:
further settling their existence. Later on newimages.org also came to light.
Others that had been previously found in IP ranges but without clear comms:
  • 65.61.127.177: material-science.org
  • 212.4.17.61: tech-stop.org
  • 74.116.72.244 arborstribune.org
.org is very rare, and has been excluded from some of our search heuristics. That was a shame, but likely not much was missed.
This is a dark art, and many of the sources are shady as fuck! We often have no idea of their methodology. Also no source is fully complete. We just piece up as best we can.
In order to explore IPs in known IP ranges, what we need are good DNS databases.
This is our primary data source, the first article that pointed out a few specific CIA websites which then served as the basis for all of our research.
We take the truth of this article as an axiom. And then all we claim is that all other websites found were made by the same people due to strong shared design principles of the such websites.
The Wayback Machine has an endpoint to query cralwed pages called the CDX server. It is documented at: github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayback-cdx-server/README.md.
This allows to filter down 10 thousands of possible domains in a few hours. But 100s of thousands would be too much. This is because you have to query exactly one URL at a time, and they possibly rate limit IPs. But no IP blacklisting so far after several hours, so it's not that bad.
Once you have a heuristic to narrow down some domains, you can use this helper: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx.sh to drill them down from 10s of thousands down to hundreds or thousands.
We then post process the results of cdx.sh with ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx-post.sh to drill them down from from thousands to dozens, and manually inspect everything.
From then on, you can just manually inspect for hist on your browser.
Accounts used so far: 6 (1500 reverse IP checks).
Their historic DNS and reverse DNS info was very valuable, and served as Ciro's the initial entry point to finding hits in the IP ranges given by Reuters.
Generic information about the website not specific on this project will be stored at: Section "viewdns.info".
Since this source is so scarce and valuable, we have been quite careful to note down all the domain and IP ranges that have been explored.
At news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496244, the creator of the viewdns.info, "Hughesey", also stated that he'd able to give some free credits for public research projects such as this one. This would have saved up going to quite a few Cafes to get those sweet extra IPs! But it was more fun in hardmode, no doubt.
We do API access to IP ranges with this simple helper: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh, usage:
./viewdns-info.sh <apikey> <start-ipv-address> <end-ipv-address>
e.g.:
./viewdns-info.sh 8b890b00b17ed2d66bbed878d51200b58d43d014 66.45.179.187 66.45.179.210
For domain to IP queries from the API you should use "iphistory" viewdns.info/api/docs/ip-history.php:
curl 'https://api.viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=todaysengineering.com&apikey=$APIKEY&output=json'
Just beware of the viewdns.info reverse IP bug, that really sucks and led to us missing a ton of domains.
This data source was very valuable, and led to many hits, and to finding the first non Reuters ranges with Section "secure subdomain search on 2013 DNS Census".
Hit overlap:
jq -r '.[].host' ../media/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json ) | xargs -I{} sqlite3 aiddcu.sqlite "select * from t where d = '{}'"
Domain hit count when we were at 279 hits: 142 hits, so about half of the hits were present.
The timing of the database is perfect for this project, it is as if the CIA had planted it themselves!
There are two keywords that are killers: "news" and "world" and their translations or closely related words. Everything else is hard. So a good start is:
grep -e news -e noticias -e nouvelles -e world -e global
iran + football:
  • iranfootballsource.com: the third hit for this area after the two given by Reuters! Epic.
3 easy hits with "noticias" (news in Portuguese or Spanish"), uncovering two brand new ip ranges:
  • 66.45.179.205 noticiasporjanua.com
  • 66.237.236.247 comunidaddenoticias.com
  • 204.176.38.143 noticiassofisticadas.com
Let's see some French "nouvelles/actualites" for those tumultuous Maghrebis:
  • 216.97.231.56 nouvelles-d-aujourdhuis.com
news + world:
  • 210.80.75.55 philippinenewsonline.net
news + global:
  • 204.176.39.115 globalprovincesnews.com
  • 212.209.74.105 globalbaseballnews.com
  • 212.209.79.40: hydradraco.com
OK, I've decided to do a complete Wayback Machine CDX scanning of news... Searching for .JAR or https.*cgi-bin.*\.cgi are killers, particularly the .jar hits, here's what came out:
  • 62.22.60.49 telecom-headlines.com
  • 62.22.61.206 worldnewsnetworking.com
  • 64.16.204.55 holein1news.com
  • 66.104.169.184 bcenews.com
  • 69.84.156.90 stickshiftnews.com
  • 74.116.72.236 techtopnews.com
  • 74.254.12.168 non-stop-news.net
  • 193.203.49.212 inews-today.com
  • 199.85.212.118 just-kidding-news.com
  • 207.210.250.132 aeronet-news.com
  • 212.4.18.129 sightseeingnews.com
  • 212.209.90.84 thenewseditor.com
  • 216.105.98.152 modernarabicnews.com
Wayback Machine CDX scanning of "world":
  • 66.104.173.186 myworldlymusic.com
"headline": only 140 matches in 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv and 3 hits out of 269 hits. Full inspection without CDX led to no new hits.
"today": only 3.5k matches in 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv and 12 hits out of 269 hits, TODO how many on those on 2013-dns-census-a-novirt? No new hits.
"world", "global", "international", and spanish/portuguese/French versions like "mondo", "mundo", "mondi": 15k matches in 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv. No new hits.
Does not appear to have any reverse IP hits unfortunately: opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/1951/dataset-of-domain-names/21077#21077. Likely only has domains that were explicitly advertised.
We could not find anything useful in it so far, but there is great potential to use this tool to find new IP ranges based on properties of existing IP ranges. Part of the problem is that the dataset is huge, and is split by top 256 bytes. But it would be reasonable to at least explore ranges with pre-existing known hits...
We have started looking for patterns on 66.* and 208.*, both selected as two relatively far away ranges that have a number of pre-existing hits. 208 should likely have been 212 considering later finds that put several ranges in 212.
tcpip_fp:
  • 66.104.
    • 66.104.175.41: grubbersworldrugbynews.com: 1346397300 SCAN(V=6.01%E=4%D=1/12%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%G=N%TM=387CAB9E%P=mipsel-openwrt-linux-gnu),ECN(R=N),T1(R=N),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=N),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
    • 66.104.175.48: worlddispatch.net: 1346816700 SCAN(V=6.01%E=4%D=1/2%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%DC=I%G=N%TM=1D5EA%P=mipsel-openwrt-linux-gnu),SEQ(SP=F8%GCD=3%ISR=109%TI=Z%TS=A),ECN(R=N),T1(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=),T1(R=N),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
    • 66.104.175.49: webworldsports.com: 1346692500 SCAN(V=6.01%E=4%D=9/3%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%DC=I%G=N%TM=5044E96E%P=mipsel-openwrt-linux-gnu),SEQ(SP=105%GCD=1%ISR=108%TI=Z%TS=A),OPS(O1=M550ST11NW6%O2=M550ST11NW6%O3=M550NNT11NW6%O4=M550ST11NW6%O5=M550ST11NW6%O6=M550ST11),WIN(W1=1510%W2=1510%W3=1510%W4=1510%W5=1510%W6=1510),ECN(R=N),T1(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=),T1(R=N),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
    • 66.104.175.50: fly-bybirdies.com: 1346822100 SCAN(V=6.01%E=4%D=1/1%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%DC=I%G=N%TM=14655%P=mipsel-openwrt-linux-gnu),SEQ(TI=Z%TS=A),ECN(R=N),T1(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=),T1(R=N),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
    • 66.104.175.53: info-ology.net: 1346712300 SCAN(V=6.01%E=4%D=9/4%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%DC=I%G=N%TM=50453230%P=mipsel-openwrt-linux-gnu),SEQ(SP=FB%GCD=1%ISR=FF%TI=Z%TS=A),ECN(R=N),T1(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=),T1(R=N),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
  • 66.175.106
    • 66.175.106.150: noticiasmusica.net: 1340077500 SCAN(V=5.51%D=1/3%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%G=N%TM=38707542%P=mipsel-openwrt-linux-gnu),ECN(R=N),T1(R=N),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
    • 66.175.106.155: atomworldnews.com: 1345562100 SCAN(V=5.51%D=8/21%OT=22%CT=443%CU=%PV=N%DC=I%G=N%TM=5033A5F2%P=mips-openwrt-linux-gnu),SEQ(SP=FB%GCD=1%ISR=FC%TI=Z%TS=A),ECN(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=1540%O=M550NNSNW6%CC=N%Q=),T1(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=),T2(R=N),T3(R=N),T4(R=N),T5(R=Y%DF=Y%TG=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=),T6(R=N),T7(R=N),U1(R=N),IE(R=N)
Domain list only, no IPs and no dates. We haven't been able to extract anything of interest from this source so far.
Domain hit count when we were at 69 hits: only 9, some of which had been since reused. Likely their data collection did not cover the dates of interest.
When you Google most of the hit domains, many of them show up on "expired domain trackers", and above all Chinese expired domain trackers for some reason, notably e.g.:
This suggests that scraping these lists might be a good starting point to obtaining "all expired domains ever".
Data comparison:
We've made the following pipelines for hupo.com + webmasterhome.cn merging:
./hupo.sh &
./webmastercn.sh &
./justdropped.sh &
wait
./justdropped-post.sh
./hupo-merge.sh
# Export as small Google indexable files in a Git repository.
./hupo-repo.sh
# Export as per year zips for Internet Archive.
./hupo-zip.sh
# Obtain count statistics:
./hupo-wc.sh
Count unique domains in the repos:
( echo */*/*/* | xargs cat ) | sort -u | wc
The extracted data is present at:Soon after uploading, these repos started getting some interesting traffic, presumably started by security trackers going "bling bling" on certain malicious domain names in their databases:
  • GitHub trackers:
    • admin-monitor.shiyue.com
    • anquan.didichuxing.com
    • app.cloudsek.com
    • app.flare.io
    • app.rainforest.tech
    • app.shadowmap.com
    • bo.serenety.xmco.fr 8 1
    • bts.linecorp.com
    • burn2give.vercel.app
    • cbs.ctm360.com 17 2
    • code6.d1m.cn
    • code6-ops.juzifenqi.com
    • codefend.devops.cndatacom.com
    • dlp-code.airudder.com
    • easm.atrust.sangfor.com
    • ec2-34-248-93-242.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
    • ecall.beygoo.me 2 1
    • eos.vip.vip.com 1 1
    • foradar.baimaohui.net 2 1
    • fty.beygoo.me
    • hive.telefonica.com.br 2 1
    • hulrud.tistory.com
    • kartos.enthec.com
    • soc.futuoa.com
    • lullar-com-3.appspot.com
    • penetration.houtai.io 2 1
    • platform.sec.corp.qihoo.net
    • plus.k8s.onemt.co 4 1
    • pmp.beygoo.me 2 1
    • portal.protectorg.com
    • qa-boss.amh-group.com
    • saicmotor.saas.cubesec.cn
    • scan.huoban.com
    • sec.welab-inc.com
    • security.ctrip.com 10 3
    • siem-gs.int.black-unique.com 2 1
    • soc-github.daojia-inc.com
    • spigotmc.org 2 1
    • tcallzgroup.blueliv.com
    • tcthreatcompass05.blueliv.com 4 1
    • tix.testsite.woa.com 2 1
    • toucan.belcy.com 1 1
    • turbo.gwmdevops.com 18 2
    • urlscan.watcherlab.com
    • zelenka.guru. Looks like a Russian hacker forum.
  • LinkedIn profile views:
Check for overlap of the merge:
grep -Fx -f <( jq -r '.[].host' ../media/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json ) cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tmp/merge/*
Next, we can start searching by keyword with Wayback Machine CDX scanning with Tor parallelization with out helper ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hupo-cdx-tor.sh, e.g. to check domains that contain the term "news":
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh mydir 'news|global' 2011 2019
produces per-year results for the regex term news|global between the years under:
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2011
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2012
OK lets:
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh out 'news|headline|internationali|mondo|mundo|mondi|iran|today'
Other searches that are not dense enough for our patience:
world|global|[^.]info
OMG news search might be producing some golden, golden new hits!!! Going full into this. Hits:
  • thepyramidnews.com
  • echessnews.com
  • tickettonews.com
  • airuafricanews.com
  • vuvuzelanews.com
  • dayenews.com
  • newsupdatesite.com
  • arabicnewsonline.com
  • arabicnewsunfiltered.com
  • newsandsportscentral.com
  • networkofnews.com
  • trekkingtoday.com
  • financial-crisis-news.com
and a few more. It's amazing.
pastebin.com/CTXnhjeS dated mega early on Sep 30th, 2012 by CYBERTAZIEX.
This source was found by Oleg Shakirov.
Holy fuck the type of data source that we get in this area of work!
This pastebin contained a few new hits, in addition to some pre-existing ones. Most of the hits them seem to be linked to the IP 72.34.53.174, which presumably is a major part of the fingerprint found by CYBERTAZIEX, though unsurprisingly methodology is unclear. As documented, the domains appear to be linked to a "Condor hosting" provider, but it is hard to find any information about it online.
From the title, it would seem that someone hacked into Condor and defaced all of its sites, including unknowingly some CIA ones which is LOL.
Ciro Santilli checked every single non-subdomain domain in the list.
Other files under the same account: pastebin.com/u/cybertaziex did not seem of interest.
The author's real name appears to be Deni Suwandi: twitter.com/denz_999 from Indonesia, but all accounts appear to be inactive, otherwise we'd ping him to ask for more info about the list.
www.zone-h.com lists some of the domains. They also seem to have intended to have snapshots of the defaces but we can't see them which is sad:
alljohnny.com had a hit: ipinf.ru/domains/alljohnny.com/, and so Ciro started looking around... and a good number of other things have hits.
Not all of them, definitely less data than viewdns.info.
But they do reverse IP, and they show which nearby reverse IPs have hits on the same page, for free, which is great!
Shame their ordering is purely alphabetical, doesn't properly order the IPs so it is a bit of a pain, but we can handle it.
OMG, Russians!!!
The data here had a little bit of non-overlap from other sources. 4 new confirmed hits were found, plus 4 possible others that were left as candidates.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact