This section tries to explain how the discoveries were made in more detail.
Some of the subsections are quite readable, while others are mostly data dumps and work logs, so bear with us.
But by looking at the URLs of the screenshots they provided from other websites we can easily uncover all others that had screenshots, except for the Johnny Carson one, which is just generically named. E.g. the image for the Chinese one is www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-spies-iran/screencap-activegaminginfo.com.jpg?v=192516290922 which leads us to domain activegaminginfo.com.
Oleg Shakirov later discovered that the Carson one had its domain written right on the screenshot, as part of a watermark present on the original website itself. Therefore the URLs of all the websites were in one way or another essentially given on the article.
The full list of domains from screenshots is:
From The Reuters websites and others we've found, we can establish see some clear stylistic trends across the websites which would allow us to find other likely candidates upon inspection:
The most notable dissonance from the rest of the web is that there are no commercial looking website of companies, presumably because it was felt that it would be possible to verify the existence of such companies.
Most domains are the only domain for its IP, i.e. the websites are mostly private hosted. However we have later found many exceptions to this general indicator, so it should not be used as a strong exclusion rule.
One promising way to find more of those would be with IP searches, since it was stated in the Reuters article that the CIA made the terrible mistake of using several contiguous IP blocks for those website. What a phenomenal OPSEC failure!!!
The easiest way would be if Wayback Machine itself had an IP search function, but we couldn't find one: Search Wayback Machine by IP.
viewdns.info was the first easily accessible website that Ciro Santilli could find that contained such information.
Our current results indicate that the typical IP range is about 30 IPs wide.
E.g. searching: viewdns.info/iphistory and considering only hits from 2011 or earlier we obtain:
Neither of these seem to be in the same ranges, the only common nearby hit amongst these ranges is the exact 68.178.232.100, and doing reverse IP search at viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=68.178.232.100&t=1 states that it has 2.5 million hostnames associated to it, so it must be some kind of Shared web hosting service, see also: superuser.com/questions/577070/is-it-possible-for-many-domain-names-to-share-one-ip-address, which makes search hard.
Ciro then tried some of the other IPs, and soon hit gold.
Initially, Ciro started by doing manual queries to viewdns.info/reversip until his IP was blocked. Then he created an account and used his 250 free queries with the following helper script: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh. The output of that script can be seen at: github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh.
Ciro then found 2013 DNS Census which contained data highly disjoint form the viewdns-info one!
Summaries of the IP range exploration done so far follows, combined data from all databases above.
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:
62.22.60.49: telecom-headlines.com. UUNET in Spain. Found with: visual inspection of full 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup list just before worldnewsnetworking.com. Tested viewdns.info range: 62.22.60.34 - 62.22.60.66
  • 62.22.60.33: newsperk.com. Almost certainly a hit. Stylistically perfect, rss-item. But no comms not found. Ennerving! 2011. English. Egypt. news. Later legitimately reused.
  • 62.22.60.34: freeslideshow.net. Legit? Attempting to open any HTML archives leads to an infinite page load loop, e.g. 2010. A subpage however exists: web.archive.org/web/20101230001640/http://freeslideshow.net/index_files/a.htm and appears legit.
  • 62.22.60.40: travel-passage.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.42: newsupdatesite.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.46: flyingtimeline.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.47: globalemergenceadvisorsbkserver.com. Legit.
  • 62.22.60.48: currentcommunique.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.49: telecom-headlines.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.52: collectedmedias.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.54: romulusactualites.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.55: thefilmcentre.com. Hit.
  • 62.22.60.56: traveltimenews.com. Hit.
62.22.61.206 worldnewsnetworking.com. UUNET in Spain. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 62.22.61.188 - 62.22.61.224
65.218.91.17 alljohnny.com. UUNET in United States. One of the Reuters websites.
63.131.229.12 cyberreportagenews.com. ADHOST in Coeur d'Alene - United States. Tested viewdns.info range: 63.131.228.248 - 63.131.229.30
  • 63.131.229.2: fightskillsresource.com. Hit
  • 63.131.229.4: unitedterritorynews.com. Hit
  • 63.131.229.9: show-dustry.com. Hit
  • 63.131.229.10: afghanpoetry.net. Hit. Also at 74.254.12.166 in another range.
  • 63.131.229.11: mythriftytrip.com. Hit
  • 63.131.229.12: cyberreportagenews.com. Hit.
  • 63.131.229.13: sunrise-news.com. Hit.
  • 63.131.229.15: cricketnewsforindia.com. Hit.
  • 63.131.229.16:
  • 63.131.229.18: itnl-xchange.com. Hit.
  • 63.131.229.20:
    • fixashion.net. Hit.
    • a few others
63.130.160.50 theglobalheadlines.com. CW Vodafone Group PLC in United States. Found with: 2013 DNS census secureserver.net MX records intersection 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup. Tested viewdns.info range: 63.130.160.35 - 63.130.160.75
64.16.204.55 holein1news.com. Saudi Telecom Company JSC in Saudi Arabia. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 64.16.204.50 - 64.16.204.63. With did Wayback Machine have so few archives here? TODO stopping viewdns.info exploration a bit short due to that.
65.61.127.163 capture-nature.com. ADHOST in Greenacres - United States. whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-65-61-96-0-1/pft?s=65.61.127.163: Net Range: 65.61.96.0 - 65.61.127.255. Organization. Name: TierPoint, LLC. Tested viewdns.info range: 65.61.127.149 -
  • 65.61.127.46: anahuacchamber.com 2012-12-22T14:59:01
  • 65.61.127.117: medicaresupplementalinsurance.com, 2013-08-21T09:49:41. Legit.
  • 65.61.127.121: counter-images.com 2013-08-22T11:14:44: web.archive.org/web/20110208173132/http://www.counter-images.com/ Empty.
  • 65.61.127.125 zaphound.com 2013-08-21T02:25:40. Legit.
  • 65.61.127.130: ambitions.org 2013-08-22T01:43:40. Legit.
  • 65.61.127.161: european-footballer.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.163: capture-nature.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.164: futbolistico.net. 2012-02-20T03:25:33. Legit. web.archive.org/web/20130509004058/http://futbolistico.net/
  • 65.61.127.165: travelconnectionsonline.com. Ciro initially though this might be a hit. But upon Googling it, there's now a mirror at: travelconn.tripod.com/. Combined with the lack of a standard communications mechanism and the 2001 copyright, maybe it isn't a hit after all
  • 65.61.127.166: globalnewsbulletin.com: Hit.
  • 65.61.127.167: internationalwhiskylounge.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.168: the-golden-rule.info 2013-09-20T02:13:52. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.169: crossovernews.net. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.170: newsidori.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.171: nrgconsultingandnews.com. Hit. 2013-08-13T18:45:05
  • 65.61.127.172: premierstriker.com. Hit. 2012-01-11
  • 65.61.127.174: dedrickonline.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.175: altworldnews.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.176: american-historyonline.com. Hit. 2011-09-08
  • 65.61.127.177: material-science.org. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.178: tee-shot.net. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.180: screencentral.info. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.181: worldnewsandtravel.com. Hit. 2011-11-13
  • 65.61.127.182: pangawana.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.183: cutabovenews.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.184: worldwildlifeadventure.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.186: explorealtmeds.com. Hit.
  • 65.61.127.194: 16 domains, so unclear.
  • 65.61.127.200: cdl-link.com (ipinf.ru). Legit.
  • 65.61.127.222: asianwhitecoffee.com 2012-07-16T09:21:05 web.archive.org/web/20110903080036/http://asianwhitecoffee.com/. Could be legit.
66.45.179.205 noticiasporjanua.com. ADHOST in Edmonds - United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup. Tested viewdns.info range: 66.45.179.187 - 66.45.179.223
  • 66.45.179.187: mail03.gatesfoundation.org. Legit.
  • 66.45.179.192: thegraceofislam.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.193: arabicnewsunfiltered.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.194: raulsonsglobalnews.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.195: aryannews.net. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.199: attivitaestremi.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.200: foodwineandsuch.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.201: hitthepavementnow.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.203: noticiascontinental.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.205: noticiasporjanua.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.206: podisticamondiale.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.207: reflectordenoticias.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.208: havenofgamerz.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.209: vejaaeuropa.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.210: sa-michigan.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.211: absolutebearing.net. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.212: grandretirement.net. No archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/grandretirement.net.html blank image.
  • 66.45.179.213: myportaltonews.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.214: investmentintellect.com. Hit.
  • 66.45.179.215: nigeriastar.net 2012-03-12. Hit.
66.104.169.184 bcenews.com. XO-AS15 in United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 66.104.169.158 - 66.104.169.189
66.104.173.186 myworldlymusic.com. XO-AS15 in United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 66.104.173.158 - 66.104.173.194
66.104.175.40 beyondnetworknews.com. XO-AS15 in United States. whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-66-104-0-0-1/pft?s=66.104.175.40. Net Range:66.104.0.0 - 66.107.255.255. 2012 Internet Census puts most/all hits in this range under ip66-104-175-34.z175-104-66.customer.algx.net, algx.net redirects to verizon.com as of 2023. Related: superuser.com/questions/956568/why-are-my-pings-going-to-customer-algx-net. Tested viewdns.info range: 66.104.175.24 - unknown
66.175.106.148 activegaminginfo.com. UUNET in United States. whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-66-175-106-128-1/pft?s=66.175.106.148: Net Range: 66.175.106.128 - 66.175.106.159. Customer Name: DIAMOND-COLESON. Tested viewdns.info range: 66.175.106.131 - 66.175.106.178
66.237.236.247 comunidaddenoticias.com. XO-AS15 in United States. Tested viewdns.info range: 66.237.236.222 - 66.237.236.254
69.84.156.90 stickshiftnews.com. COLOSPACE in Methuen - United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 69.84.156.64 - 69.84.156.95
  • 69.84.156.69: al-ashak-news-me.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.70: theventurenews.info. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.71: worldfinancetoday.net. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.72: autonewsarabia.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.74: blue-moon-news.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.75: theoutergreen.com. No archives. Might have been another golf hit. cqcounter.com/whois/www/theoutergreen.com.html not found.
  • 69.84.156.76: tnc-urdu.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.79: jassimnews.com. No archives/broken. cqcounter.com/whois/www/jassimnews.com.html blank.
  • 69.84.156.80: noticiasdenuestromundo.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.82: arabicnewsonline.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.83: unganadormundial.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.84: focusonbokeh.com. Hit. Network Solutions, LLC.
  • 69.84.156.85: classic-rocktopia.com. Hit. domainsbyproxy.com.
  • 69.84.156.87: i7diver.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.88: diariodeelmundo.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.89: todaysarabnews.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.90: stickshiftnews.com. Hit.
  • 69.84.156.91: theinternationalgoal.com. Hit.
72.34.53.174 technologytodayandtomorrow.com. IHNET in United States. This IP is special. This IP is somehow closely linked to the "Mass Deface III" pastebin as it seems to have been hosted by Condor hosting. They also have many old sites, and links to Russia which is apparently where this was hosted.
74.116.72.236 techtopnews.com. OPTIMUM-WIFI2 in Brooklyn - United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 74.116.72.215 - 74.116.72.254
74.254.12.168 non-stop-news.net. BELLSOUTH-NET-BLK in Atlantic Beach - United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 74.254.12.158 - 74.254.12.195. This domain exceptionally also has a second IP also with multihits: 207.239.196.230. The fact that the range has rdns sources with hits from both 2013 DNS Census and viewdns.info suggests this range is correct.
173.208.81.2 LEASEWEB-USA-CHI in Lombard - United States:
199.85.212.118 just-kidding-news.com. ATT-INTERNET4 in United States.
204.176.38.143 noticiassofisticadas.com. UUNET in United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup. Tested viewdns.info range: 204.176.38.125 - 204.176.38.154
  • 204.176.38.130: i-pressnews.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.132: turkishnewslinks.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.134: photographyarecord.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.135: breakingthewicket.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.136: politicalworldtoday.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.137: hi-tech-today.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.138: continental-business-news.com. TODO. rss-item, split images. 2011. Cannot find comms. Also header and footer are not limited width which is unusual. Further HTML similarity reversing would be needed.
  • 204.176.38.139: bigscreenbattles.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.141: rakotafootball.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.142: senderosdemontana.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.143: noticiassofisticadas.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.144: techno-today.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.145: tickettonews.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.146: dps-digitalphotosharing.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.147: theputtingreen.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.149: sportsnewstodayar.com. Hit.
  • 204.176.38.150: kairuafricanews.com. Hit.
204.176.39.115 globalprovincesnews.com. UUNET in United States. Tested viewdns.info range: 204.176.39.93 - 204.176.39.124
207.150.191.68 technologypresstoday.com. Saudi Telecom Company JSC in Saudi Arabia.
207.210.250.132 aeronet-news.com. AS17378 in United States. This is the Autonomous System Number for TierPoint, LLC. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 207.210.250.126 - 207.210.250.157
  • 207.210.250.131: starrynightnews.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.132: aeronet-news.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.133: bakaribulletin.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.134: deprensaenlarevisiondehoy.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.135: icwb-news.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.136: sportsreelhighlights.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.137: fashionforward.info. No archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/fashionforward.info.html innovative but has a "Member" section. Stock lady visible somwhere at westlahairgrowth.com/?page_id=12158 according to Google images but I couldn't find it easily in the page.
  • 207.210.250.138: inquiry-human-past.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.139: thefairwaysaregreen.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.142: russiaupdate.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.143: archaeologyreview.net. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.144: highspeed-news.com. No archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/highspeed-news.com.html not found.
  • 207.210.250.146: noticias-caracas.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.147: bailandstump.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.148: classicalmusic4arab.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.149: globalventurestat.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.152: al-rashidrealestate.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.153: newsintheworld-ru.com. Hit.
  • 207.210.250.154: news-unlimited.info. Hit.
208.93.112.105 fastnews-online.com. TULIP-SYSTEMS in United States. Checked viewdns.info range: 208.93.112.90 - 208.93.112.155
208.254.38.39 todaysengineering.com. COLO-PREM-VZB in United States.
  • Tested viewdns.info range: 208.254.38.9 - 208.254.38.86. Weirdly empty, doesn't even show the domain iteslf!
  • 68.178.232.100: source: securitytrails.com. 2009-11-24 - 2009-12-11, GoDaddy.com, LLC
208.254.40.117 worldnewsandent.com. COLO-PREM-VZB in United States. whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-208-192-0-0-1/pft?s=208.254.40.117: Net Range 208.192.0.0 - 208.255.255.255. Tested viewdns.info range: 208.254.40.92 - 208.254.40.135
  • 208.254.40.96: sixty2media.com. Hit.
  • 208.254.40.99: newspoliticssource.com. Hit.
  • 208.254.40.110 musical-fortune.net. Hit.
  • 208.254.40.113: ashoka-gemstones.com. Hit.
  • 208.254.40.117: worldnewsandent.com. Hit.
  • 208.254.40.124: riskandrewardnews.com. Hit.
  • 208.254.40.129: mailb.casella.com. Legit.
208.254.42.205 driversinternationalgolf.com. COLO-PREM-VZB in United States. Tested viewdns.info range: 208.254.42.178 - 208.254.42.233.
209.162.192.49 rastadirect.net. DF-PTL2-3 in Gresham - United States. Source: securitytrails.com and cqcounter.com/site/rastadirect.net.html. Tested viewdns.info: 209.162.192.30 209.162.192.70
* 209.162.192.44: thejewelofsouthamerica.com. Hit.
* 209.162.192.49: rastadirect.net. Hit.
* 209.162.192.51: yellow-chair-report.com. Hit.
* 209.162.192.54: tutkulu-turu.com. Possible hit. domainsbyproxy.com 2008-03-04. Weird style made up exclusively of cut up images, including the text itself where links would normally be. Turkish. Archive a bit weird with images on top of text. 2011 Copyright 2006. Unarchived link to web.archive.org/web/20110129065840/http://tutkulu-turu.com/login.html with title "Kullanıcı adı" (Username). Headline "Online seyahat etmek acenta" translates to "Online travel agency".
* 209.162.192.57: globalnewsreports.net. Hit.
* 209.162.192.59: easytravelsite.net. Hit.
* 209.162.192.70: phrio.com. Off date. viewdns.info/reverseip/?t=1&host=209.162.192.70
210.80.75.55 philippinenewsonline.net. UUNET in Australia. Tested viewdns.info range: 210.80.75.30 - 210.80.75.67
  • 210.80.75.35: aroundtheworldnews.net. No archives. ipinf.ru/domains/210.80.75.33/ disagrees and places it at .33.
  • 210.80.75.36: e-commodities.net. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.37: trekkingtoday.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.41: multinews-33.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.42: movimientodenticias.com. No archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/movimientodenticias.com.html blank.
  • 210.80.75.43: gulfandmiddleeastnews.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.44: whirlybirdinflight.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.45: kings-game.net. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.46: topglobalnewsdaily.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.49: recipe-dujour.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.53: sportsman-elite.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.55: philippinenewsonline.net. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.56: technewsforme.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.59: goldeportesnoticias.com. Hit.
  • 210.80.75.68: gigabyte-usa.com. Legit.
212.4.16.232 mynewscheck.com. UUNET in Cassano d'Adda - Italy. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 212.4.16.214 - 212.4.17.198. ipinf.ru/domains/?search=212.4.17.125&cust=1 says they are /19, so .16 and .17 are both the same range from a registration perspective::
212.4.17.38 fightwithoutrules.com. UUNET in Cassano d'Adda - Italy. whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-208-192-0-0-1/pft?s=208.254.40.117. Net Range: 208.192.0.0 - 208.255.255.255. Organization: Name: Verizon Business. Tested viewdns.info range: see 212.4.16.* above
  • 212.4.17.38: fightwithoutrules.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.41: newtechfrontier.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.43: smart-travel-consultant.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.46: atentlaloc.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.53: newsresolution.net. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.56: lesummumdelafinance.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.56: thepinnacleoffinance.com. No Wayback machine archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/thepinnacleoffinance.com.html blank.
  • 212.4.17.61: tech-stop.org. Archive: 2011. Feels likely. No commons found. .org hit? Has subdomain "gear.tech-stop.org" according to 2013 DNS Census, which suggests CGI comms, but no links to it
  • 212.4.17.98: topbillingsite.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.122: b2bworldglobal.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.125: worldaroundyunnan.com. Hit.
  • 212.4.17.160: localtoglobalnews.com. Hit.
There were also some other reverse IP hits for fightwithoutrules.com, but no CIA websites there:
  • 204.11.56.25 - British Virgin Islands - Confluence Networks Inc - 2013-09-26. Many domains.
  • 208.91.197.19 - British Virgin Islands - Confluence Networks Inc - 2013-05-20. Many domains.
Other hits:
  • 208.91.197.132. rdns source: viewdns.info: "location" : "British Virgin Islands", "owner" : "Confluence Networks Inc", "lastseen" : "2013-09-26". So this is after the previous one, unlikely to be correct.
  • 205.178.189.131. source: securitytrails.com
212.4.18.129 sightseeingnews.com. UUNET in Cassano d'Adda - Italy. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 212.4.18.115 - 212.4.18.148. TODO expand. Interesting wide/sparse range? Or perhaps it's two separate ranges?
212.209.74.105 globalbaseballnews.com. UUNET in Sweden. Tested viewdns.info range: 212.209.74.100 - 212.209.74.132. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches
212.209.79.40 hydradraco.com. UUNET in Sweden. Found with: visual inspection of full 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup list just after globalbaseballnews.com. Tested viewdns.info range: 212.209.79.35 - 212.209.79.63
  • 212.209.79.34: fgnl.net. Hit. securitytrails.com provides IP history:
    • 212.209.79.34: 2008-09-01 - 2010-04-19.
    • 212.4.18.133: 2010-04-19 - 2019-06-19. Tested viewdns.info range: 212.4.18.122 - 212.4.18.148
    both under MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business.
  • 212.209.79.37: fitness-sources.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.40: hydradraco.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.41: noticiasdelmundolatino.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.42: suparakuvi.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.44: myigadgets.net. Unclear. 2010. tech. Contains some helpers to: iGoogle. This page is very interesting. and quite different from the others, as it contains highly specialized functionality. No known comms found. The choice of homepage languages is also very suspicious: Arabic, Farsi, French, Chinese and Spanish.
  • 212.209.79.46: cetusdelph.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.47: willtoworship.com. Hit. domainsbyproxy.com
  • 212.209.79.48: themvconnection.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.51: pi-resources.net. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.52: newel-adserver.com. Redirects to newel.com which is legit. cqcounter.com/whois/www/newel-adserver.com.html blank.
  • 212.209.79.53: ourscubaworld.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.58: tech-love-home.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.60: first-solo-aviation.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.79.61: china-destinations.org. Hit.
212.209.90.84 thenewseditor.com. UUNET in Sweden. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 212.209.90.64 - 212.209.90.99
  • 212.209.90.69: worldedgenews.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.72: talkingpointnews.info. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.74: globalinvestmentnews.net. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.75: prebitinvestment.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.77: energy-bulb.com 2011. English. energy. Comms not found, but has unarchived link to: web.archive.org/web/20110128182345/https://webmail.energy-bulb.com/login.html. CGI comms variant?
  • 212.209.90.79: freeblink.com. No archives for timerange, then legit. cqcounter.com/whois/www/freeblink.com.html off-style
  • 212.209.90.80: nsmovies.net. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.82: middleeastjournal.net. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.84: thenewseditor.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.87: newsandweathersource.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.89: pakisports.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.90: vriha-aesthetics.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.92: amishkanews.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.93: theentertainbiz.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.90.94: eurosportssummary.com. Hit.
  • 212.209.91.14: teracom.net. Legit
216.93.248.194 esmundonoticias.com. TWDX in Chelmsford - United States.
216.104.38.114 all-sport-headlines.com. SINGLEHOP-LLC in United States.
216.105.98.152: modernarabicnews.com. SAVVY-NET in United States. Found with: 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches. Tested viewdns.info range: 216.105.98.125 - 216.105.98.167
  • 216.105.98.118:
  • 216.105.98.132: europeantravelcafe.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.134: fuenteneta.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.135: ilat-news.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.136: etherealinspirations.net. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.137: the-news-zone.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.138: photozoomnews.com. No archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/photozoomnews.com.html empty
  • 216.105.98.139: cultura-digital.net. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.140: uaeshoppingspree.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.141: jabarifootball.com. No archives. "Jabari" is a Swahili/Arabic name[ref]. cqcounter.com/whois/www/jabarifootball.com.html not found.
  • 216.105.98.142: globalreview-ar.com. No archives. Shame, could have been our first Argentinian site. cqcounter.com/whois/www/globalreview-ar.com.html empty.
  • 216.105.98.144: garanziadellasicurezza.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.145: montanismoaventura.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.146: large-format-news.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.147: nepalnewsbrief.com. Hit. dnshistory.org marks it as having IP 2010-03-10 -> 2010-08-15 216.169.148.94 [ref]. This range does feel a bit different from the others, too many broken archives, and relatively early ones too. Explored viewdns.info range: 216.169.148.84 - 216.169.148.104, empty for period. domainsbyproxy.com.
  • 216.105.98.148: teclafinance.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.149: entreman.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.152: modernarabicnews.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.153: global-headlines.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.154: everythingcricket.org. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.156: familyhealthonline.net. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.157: delacorne.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.158: econfutures.com. Hit.
  • 216.105.98.161: kstcloud.com. No archives. cqcounter.com/whois/www/kstcloud.com.html not found
219.90.61.123 journeystravelled.com. UUNET in Taiwan. Tested viewdns.info range: 219.90.61.100 - 219.90.61.133
219.90.62.243 fitness-dawg.com. UUNET in Taiwan. whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-219-0-0-0-1/pft?s=219.90.62.243. Net Type: Allocated to APNIC. Tested viewdns.info range: unknown - 219.90.62.255
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.
First we must start the tor servers with the tor-army command from: stackoverflow.com/questions/14321214/how-to-run-multiple-tor-processes-at-once-with-different-exit-ips/76749983#76749983
tor-army 100
and then use it on a newline separated domain name list to check;
./cdx-tor.sh infile.txt
This creates a directory infile.txt.cdx/ containing:
  • infile.txt.cdx/out00, out01, etc.: the suspected CDX lines from domains from each tor instance based on the simple criteria that the CDX can handle directly. We split the input domains into 100 piles, and give one selected pile per tor instance.
  • infile.txt.cdx/out: the final combined CDX output of out00, out01, ...
  • infile.txt.cdx/out.post: the final output containing only domain names that match further CLI criteria that cannot be easily encoded on the CDX query. This is the cleanest domain name list you should look into at the end basically.
Since archive is so abysmal in its data access, e.g. a Google BigQuery would solve our issues in seconds, we have to come up with creative ways of getting around their IP throttling.
The CIA doesn't play fair. They're actually the exact opposite of fair. So neither shall we.
This should allow a full sweep of the 4.5M records in 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup in a reasonable amount of time. After JAR/SWF/CGI filtering we obtained 5.8k domains, so a reduction factor of about 1 million with likely very few losses. Not bad.
5.8k is still a bit annoying to fully go over however, so we can also try to count CDX hits to the domains and remove anything with too many hits, since the CIA websites basically have very few archives:
cd 2013-dns-census-a-novirt-domains.txt.cdx
./cdx-tor.sh -d out.post domain-list.txt
cd out.post.cdx
cut -d' ' -f1 out | uniq -c | sort -k1 -n | awk 'match($2, /([^,]+),([^)]+)/, a) {printf("%s.%s %d\n", a[2], a[1], $1)}' > out.count
This gives us something like:
12654montana.com 1
aeronet-news.com 1
atohms.com 1
av3net.com 1
beechstreetas400.com 1
sorted by increasing hit counts, so we can go down as far as patience allows for!
New results from a full CDX scan of 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv:
  • 219.90.61.123 journeystravelled.com
Many hits appear to happen on the same days, and per-day data does exist: archive.org/details/widecrawl but apparently cannot be publicly downloaded unfortunately. But maybe there's another way? TODO select candidates.
Accounts used so far: 6 (1500 reverse IP checks).
Their historic DNS and reverse DNS info was very valuable, and served as Ciro's the initial entry point to finding hits in the IP ranges given by Reuters.
Generic information about the website not specific on this project will be stored at: Section "viewdns.info".
Since this source is so scarce and valuable, we have been quite careful to note down all the domain and IP ranges that have been explored.
At news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496244, the creator of the viewdns.info, "Hughesey", also stated that he'd able to give some free credits for public research projects such as this one. This would have saved up going to quite a few Cafes to get those sweet extra IPs! But it was more fun in hardmode, no doubt.
We do API access to IP ranges with this simple helper: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh, usage:
./viewdns-info.sh <apikey> <start-ipv-address> <end-ipv-address>
e.g.:
./viewdns-info.sh 8b890b00b17ed2d66bbed878d51200b58d43d014 66.45.179.187 66.45.179.210
For domain to IP queries from the API you should use "iphistory" viewdns.info/api/docs/ip-history.php:
curl 'https://api.viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=todaysengineering.com&apikey=$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!
We've noticed that often when there is a hit range:
  • there is only one IP for each domain
  • there is a range of about 20-30 of those
and that this does not seem to be that common. Let's see if that is a reasonable fingerprint or not.
Note that although this is the most common case, we have found multiple hits that viewdns.info maps to the same IP.
First we create a table u (unique) that only have domains which are the only domain for an IP, let's see by how much that lowers the 191 M total unique domains:
time sqlite3 u.sqlite 'create table t (d text, i text)'
time sqlite3 av.sqlite -cmd "attach 'u.sqlite' as u" "insert into u.t select min(d) as d, min(i) as i from t where d not like '%.%.%' group by i having count(distinct d) = 1"
The not like '%.%.%' removes subdomains from the counts so that CGI comms are still included, and distinct in count(distinct is because we have multiple entries at different timestamps for some of the hits.
Let's start with the 208 subset to see how it goes:
time sqlite3 av.sqlite -cmd "attach 'u.sqlite' as u" "insert into u.t select min(d) as d, min(i) as i from t where i glob '208.*' and d not like '%.%.%' and (d like '%.com' or d like '%.net') group by i having count(distinct d) = 1"
OK, after we fixed bugs with the above we are down to 4 million lines with unique domain/IP pairs and which contains all of the original hits! Almost certainly more are to be found!
This data is so valuable that we've decided to upload it to: archive.org/details/2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv Format:
8,chrisjmcgregor.com
11,80end.com
28,fine5.net
38,bestarabictv.com
49,xy005.com
50,cmsasoccer.com
80,museemontpellier.net
100,newtiger.com
108,lps-promptservice.com
111,bridesmaiddressesshow.com
The numbers of the first column are the IPs as a 32-bit integer representation, which is more useful to search for ranges in.
To make a histogram with the distribution of the single hostname IPs:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
bin=$((2**24))
sqlite3 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.sqlite -cmd '.mode csv' >2013-dns-census-a-novirt-hist.csv <<EOF
select i, sum(cnt) from (
  select floor(i/${bin}) as i,
         count(*) as cnt
    from t
    group by 1
  union
  select *, 0 as cnt from generate_series(0, 255)
)
group by i
EOF
gnuplot \
  -e 'set terminal svg size 1200, 800' \
  -e 'set output "2013-dns-census-a-novirt-hist.svg"' \
  -e 'set datafile separator ","' \
  -e 'set tics scale 0' \
  -e 'unset key' \
  -e 'set xrange[0:255]' \
  -e 'set title "Counts of IPs with a single hostname"' \
  -e 'set xlabel "IPv4 first byte"' \
  -e 'set ylabel "count"' \
  -e 'plot "2013-dns-census-a-novirt-hist.csv" using 1:2:1 with labels' \
;
Which gives the following useless noise, there is basically no pattern:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/2013-dns-census-a-novirt-hist.svg
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.

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