Updates / 60 new CIA website screenshots discovered on CQ Counter Updated +Created 2025-06-12
While procrastinating I suddenly remembered that cqcounter.com/siteinfo/ has screenshots of many many old websites, and I decided to look at possible hits in known IP ranges for which the Wayback Machine archive was broken.
Luckily I had already maintained a clear list of known domains in IP ranges which had no or broken wayback machine archive, so I just went over those.
This led to finding 60 novel screenshots of previously examined domains that are in common CIA-style, thus confirming them as hits beyond reasonable doubt in my mind. This also publicly revealed for the first time how a few new websites looked like, and what was their content, and in particular the target language, which could sometimes not be easily determined from the domain name alone.
This novel CQ Counter screenshot interpretation, plus a few new random discoveries and a slight relaxation of fingerprint requisites described described below moves us to 473 hits up from the previous 397!
The newly found websites were all just soulless bulk or mildly cute like the vast majority of them, but I did find found a few new screenshots of CIA websites that targeted other democracies:
I've also decided to now classify garanziadellasicurezza.com (Italy) as a hit due to various forms of supporting evidence being present. The archive is very broken however unfortunately.
Figure 1.
2011 cqcounter archive of affairesdumonde.com targeting France
. Source.
Figure 2.
2011 cqcounter archive of romulusactualites.com targeting France
. Source.
Figure 3.
2011 cqcounter archive of ordenpolicial.com targeting Spain
. Source.
Figure 4.
2011 cqcounter archive of vejaaeuropa.com targeting Brazil
. Source.
Figure 5.
2011 cqcounter archive of european-footballer.com targeting Croatia
. Source.
The fingerprint of "having a visually similar CQ Counter screenshot" is definitely weaker than a Wayback Machine archive as we only have a screenshot and can't inspect the HTML to find the communication mechanism. But when the screenshot is perfectly in CIA style and in a known IP range, the evidence is too strong and we'll consider it as a hit moving forward.
I'm also going to reclassify a few previously known domains in confirmed IP ranges as hits as hits either when:
This is a slight moving of goalposts, but those cases just feel overwhelmingly probably.
I love how this project has led me to use whatever random sources come in hand! CQ Counter is the ONLY website that I know of besides the Wayback Machine that has historical screenshots of a huge number of domains. Their database is VERY complete. But they are so obscure!
They even have the old IP of the domain. But because they don't have reverse IP to domain reverse search, and are heavily CAPTCHAed preventing search engines from properly indexing them, we can't use them to fill in existing IP ranges... So the search for the most complete DNS database that doesn't cost 15k USD like DomainTools continues www.reddit.com/r/OSINT/comments/1j8uasm/does_domaintools_offer_historical_reverse_ip_ie/
Interestingly a large number of the websites with broken Wayback Machine are from regions outside of the USA, presumably being slower to load from Wayback Machine US-based servers makes he archives more likely to break.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Possible hits Updated +Created
Likely hits possible but whose archives is too broken to be easily certain. If:
were to ever be found, these would be considered hits.
africainnews.com
globalsentinelsite.com. dawhois.com/www/globalsentinelsite.com.html empty. Copyright 2011 on top and 2008 on bottom. Unusually wide, has a few sections, but somewhat shallow. Copyright 2008. JAR JAR. a.rss-item
todaysolar.com. This might just be legit, but keeping it around just in case.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites / JS comms Updated +Created
CIA 2010 covert communication websites / cqcounter Updated +Created
cqcounter.com has an exceptionally complete database containing:
Unfortunately I can't find a reverse IP search method.
And perhaps due to having lots of CAPTCHAs, Google doesn't seem to index that website very well... it even has a tiny screenshot! And it also shows some more metadata beyond IP, e.g. HTTP response headers, which notably contain stuff like Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1.
They seem to have an exceptionally complete database.
Both cqcounter.com/whois/www/teclafinance.com.html and cqcounter.com/whois/site/activegaminginfo.com.html both are broken, so it appears that their screenshot mechanism at the time did nor support Chinese characters well.
They also have some random localized versions:These can be useful if your IP gets blacklisted on the main site because you were checking too many sites.
As of 2025 they are marked at cqcounter.com/ as "Copyright 2000-2004".
Network Solutions Updated +Created
Unicode character property Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Input output toplevel boxes Updated +Created
There are two toplevel boxes, one contains only input, and all output goes to the second one. The second one may also contain some input.
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Two toplevel boxes Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Horizontal line Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Vertical line Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Bottom edge Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Top edge Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Right edge Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Left edge Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Point Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Diagonal line Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Perpendicular line Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Monocolor line Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Dotted line Updated +Created
ARC-AGI-2 problem / Adjacent Updated +Created

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