For the love of God, on Ubuntu install from the official AppImage downloaded from electrum.org/#download, not this random outdated Snap snapcraft.io/electrum:
Quick overview at stackoverflow.com/questions/1780599/what-is-the-meaning-of-posix/31865755#31865755
Exmples under c/posix:
- c/posix/signal_return.c: stackoverflow.com/questions/37063212/where-does-signal-handler-return-back-to
- c/posix/inet/pton.c:
inet_pton
demo. Adapted fromman inet_pton
on Ubuntu 23.04. Usage:Output:./pton.out 192.187.1.42
So we see that the strings was converted to an integer, e.g.:0xc0bb012a
See also: stackoverflow.com/questions/1680622/ip-address-to-integer-c/76520978#76520978- 0xc0 = 192
- 0xbb = 187
- 0x01 = 1
- 0x2a = 42
- c/posix/inet/ntop.c:
inet_ntop
demo. Adapted fromman inet_pton
on Ubuntu 23.04. Usage:Output:./ntop.out 0x01021AA0
./ntop.out 0x01021AA0
The Reuters article directly reported only two domains in writing:
- iraniangoals.com. Iranian language football website. As of 2023, the domain had been bought by Reuters and redirects to their website.
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:
- 2011 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110208113503/http://activegaminginfo.com/. Contains mentions of 2010.
- As of 2023, it seemed to be an actual legit photography website by German (amateur?) photographer Klaus Wägele. Archive: web.archive.org/web/20230323102504/https://www.capture-nature.com/Ciro Santilli actually sent him a message to let him know about the CIA thing in case he didn't, and he replied that he wasn't aware of it.
- 2011 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110201164741/https://www.headlines2day.com/. Dated "Copyright 2009".
fitness-dawg.com
: English fitness website.2021 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110207104044/http://fitness-dawg.com/.Domain available as of 2023.rastadirect.net
: English Rastafari culture website.Domain available as of 2023.- 2011 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110203021315/http://fightwithoutrules.com/. Contains mentions of 2009 news.Domain available as of 2023.
- 2004 archive: web.archive.org/web/20040113025122/http://alljohnny.com/.Domain available as of 2023.
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.
- natural sounding, sometimes long-ish, domain names generally with 2 or 3 full words. Most in English language, but a few in Spanish, and very few in other languages like French.
- shallow websites with a few tabs, many external links, sometimes many images, and few internal pages
- common themes include:
- .com and .net top-level domains, plus a few other very rare non .com .net TLDs, notably .info and .org
- each one has one "communication mechanism file": communication mechanisms
- narrow page width like in the days of old, lots of images
- split header images
- some common pattern they follow in their news lists:
ul.rss-items > li.rss-item
, e.g.: web.archive.org/web/20110202092126/http://beamingnews.com/- links with class
a.newslink
anda.newslinkalt
e.g. web.archive.org/web/20110128181622/http://profile-news.com/
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:
- capture-nature.com
- 65.61.127.163 - Greenacres - United States - TierPoint - 2013-10-19
- activegaminginfo.com
- 66.175.106.148 - United States - Verizon Business - 2012-03-03
- iraniangoals.com
- 68.178.232.100 - United States - GoDaddy.com - 2011-11-13
- 69.65.33.21 - Flushing - United States - GigeNET - 2011-09-08
- rastadirect.net
- 68.178.232.100 - United States - GoDaddy.com - 2011-05-02
- iraniangoalkicks.com
- 68.178.232.100 - United States - GoDaddy.com - 2011-04-04
- headlines2day.com
- 118.139.174.1 - Singapore - Web Hosting Service - 2013-06-30. Source: viewdns.info
- 184.168.221.91 2013-08-12T06:17:39. Source: 2013 DNS Census grep
- fightwithoutrules.com
- fitness-dawg.com
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.
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.
- www.zone-h.org/archive/ip=208.76.80.93/page=11?hz=1 mentions
newsupdatesite.com
and mentions "defacement", the "Mass Deface III" pastebin comes to mind. No other nearby hits on quick inspection.
In this section we document the outcomes of more detailed inspection of both the communication mechanisms (JavaScript, JAR, swf) and HTML that might help to better fingerprint the websites.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites Google searches for known domains and IPs by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Googling most domains gives only very few results, and most of them are just useless lists of expired domains. Skipping those for now.
Googling
"dedrickonline.com"
has a git at www.webwiki.de/dedrickonline.com# Furthermore, it also contains the IP address "65.61.127.174" under the "Technik" tab!Unfortunately that website appears to be split by language? E.g. the English version does not contain it: www.webwiki.com/dedrickonline.com, which would make searching a bit harder, but still doable.
IP search did work! www.webwiki.de/65.61.127.174
But doesn't often/ever work unfortunately for others.
Searching on github.com: github.com/DrWhax/cia-website-comms by Jurre van Bergen from September 2022 contains some of the links to some of the ones reported by Reuters including some of their JARs, presumably for reversing purposees. Pinged him at: github.com/DrWhax/cia-website-comms/issues/1
Summary: this is just a red herring. Wakatime owner likely registered the domains just after this article was published as a publicity stunt. Fair play though.
As raised at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280666, many, but not all, of the domains currently redirect to wakatime.com/ as of 2023, and apparently they were taken up in 2013 (TODO how to confirm that). TODO what is the explanation for that? Some examples that do:But some failed resolution examples:Even more suspiciously, according to his LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alanhamlett/, the owner of Wakatime, Alan Hamlett, worked at WhiteHat Security, Inc from Aug 2011 - Sep 2013. The company was then acquired by Synopsys in 2022. Holy crap!!! As shown at: web.archive.org/web/20131013193406/https://www.whitehatsec.com/ that company made website security tools. Did that dude use the tools to find the vulnerabilty and then just gobble up all the domains??? What a fucking legend if he did!!!
Let's try:
Running e.g.gives:so we see that he must have setup redirection with Namecheap as mentioned at: www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/385/2237/how-to-redirect-a-url-for-a-domain/
curl -vvv dedrickonline.com
* Trying 162.255.119.197:80...
* Connected to dedrickonline.com (162.255.119.197) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: dedrickonline.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.88.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:30:19 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< Content-Length: 55
< Connection: keep-alive
< Location: https://wakatime.com
< X-Served-By: Namecheap URL Forward
< Server: namecheap-nginx
<
<a href='https://wakatime.com'>Moved Permanently</a>.
* Connection #0 to host dedrickonline.com left intact
Let's also try DNS history
- whoisrequest.com/history/:
- tools.whoisxmlapi.com/whois-history-search
- dedrickonline.com:
- CIA (registrar: Godaddy, registrant name: domainsbyproxy.com)
- Created Date: October 27, 2010 00:00:00 UTC
- Updated Date: October 28, 2013 00:00:00 UTC
- Expires Date: October 27, 2014 00:00:00 UTC
- Alan (namecheap):
- Created Date: June 11, 2023 09:59:25 UTC
- Expires Date: June 11, 2024 09:59:25 UTC
- CIA (registrar: Godaddy, registrant name: domainsbyproxy.com)
- activegaminginfo.com:
- CIA (Network Solutions, registrant name: LLC. Corral, Elizabeth|ATTN ACTIVEGAMINGINFO.COM|care of Network Solutions)
- Created Date: January 26, 2010 00:00:00 UTC
- Updated Date: November 27, 2010 00:00:00 UTC
- Expires Date: January 26, 2012 00:00:00 UTC
- Alan:
- Created Date: June 11, 2023 09:59:40 UTC
- Expires Date: June 11, 2024 09:59:40 UTC
- CIA (Network Solutions, registrant name: LLC. Corral, Elizabeth|ATTN ACTIVEGAMINGINFO.COM|care of Network Solutions)
- iraniangoalkicks.com:
- iraniangoals.com:
- CIA (registrar: Godaddy, registrant name: domainsbyproxy.com):
- Reuters:
- Created Date: September 29, 2022 11:16:09 UTC
- Updated Date: September 29, 2022 11:16:09 UTC
- Expires Date: September 29, 2023 11:16:09 UTC
- dedrickonline.com:
So these suggest Alan might have just come along in 2023 way after the 2022 Reuters article and did the same basic IP range search that Ciro is doing now, so possibly no new tech. Let's ask... twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1668369786865164289
Searching tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search with term "Corral, Elizabeth" gave no results unfortunately.
Basic search under tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "Corral" also empty. They can't see their own data? Ah, need advanced. Marked "Historic" and selected "Corral, Elizabeth", ony one hit, activegaminginfo.com.
Sources of whois history include:
- whois-history.whoisxmlapi.com/ from whoisXMLAPI. Notably they also have historical reverse WHOIS... tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search but it needs credits. TODO we need to squeeze this a but further at some point.
When that data comes in JSON format as from whoisXMLAPI, we are going to just dump it in github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/whois.json
The vast majority of domains seem to be registered either via domainsbyproxy.com which likely intgrates with Godaddy and is widely used, and seems to give zero infromation at all about the registrar.
A much smaller number however uses other methods, some of which sometimes leak a little bit of data:Big question: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/13237/how-do-you-view-domain-whois-history DomainTools also has it.
- Network Solutions, LLC. These sometimes give a tiny bit of information: one name. Other times they are hidden behind Perfect Privacy, LLC. Examples>Pulley, Tammy
- alljohnny.net: L. Glaze. tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search "Glaze, L." has
- webstorageforme.com. web.archive.org/web/20130917230604/http://webstorageforme.com/ broken, cqcounter.com/whois/www/webstorageforme.com.html blank
- welcometonyc.net. Hit!
- international-smallbusiness.com. Same IP as alljohnny.net and quite possibly hit..
- alljohnny.com. Hit!
- locateontheweb.com. cqcounter.com/whois/www/locateontheweb.com.html broken/test page
- rolling-in-rapids.com. web.archive.org/web/20111101080224/rolling-in-rapids.com no archives but cqcounter.com/whois/www/rolling-in-rapids.com.html hit style! viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=rolling-in-rapids.com puts it at:
- 208.91.197.132 British Virgin Islands CONFLUENCE-NETWORK-INC 2014-01-31
- 65.218.91.9 United States UUNET 2013-12-20 so matchwith welcometonyc.com but not listed at viewdns.info/reverseip/?t=1&host=65.218.91.9 because of the viewdns.info reverse IP bug!
- differentviewtoday.com: tools.whoisxmlapi.com/whois-history-search kind of empty no name
but presumably these are the names of employees of the company? We are yet to see two identical names however, which also suggests fake names. Network Solutions appears to offer both hosting and domain registration, and the CIA seems to have used this service combo a lot.- golf-on-holiday.com: Pulley, Tammy. No tools.whoisxmlapi.com/whois-history-search reverse hits.
- intoworldnews.com: Benjamin McGrew. Only that hit for reverse name at tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search
- magneticfieldnews.com: Sarah Lowell tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search has 9 domains
- sarahlowell.com: web.archive.org/web/20110208130657/http://sarahlowell.com/ Yoga instructor.
- puppychallengesacademy.com
- sarahlowelldogtraining.com
- puppychallenges.com. web.archive.org/web/20130517151924/http://puppychallenges.com/ wordpress.
- puppychallenges.net
- realwomensduathlon.com. No archives of era: web.archive.org/web/20180808101430/http://realwomensduathlon.com/
- magneticfieldnews.com. Hit.
- highflyingagility.com. Legit? Service offer.
- ropies.com. web.archive.org/web/20111101080224/http://ropies.com/
- medicatechinfo.com: Jason Noll. Has the following hits at tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search
- dreamschemedesigns.com. Legit
- dreamschemedesigns.net
- aviationturbinesinternational.com. No relevant archives.
- garysluhan.com. Seems legit.
- cjlogic.com: registrar Godaddy (not Network Services!) and contact:This image is his Gmail's current profile image as of 2025: openclipart.org/detail/19437/high-wing-airplane
Noll, Jason noll.jason@gmail.com 104 Southridge Ct. Marthasville, Missouri 63357 United States (660) 441-0780 Fax --
- medicatechinfo.com. Hit.
- health-men-today.com. Hit. Holy fuck it has two hits out of 7!!!
- mydailynewsreport.com: Rebecca Melancon on tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search:
- rebecca-melancon.com. web.archive.org/web/20180808172531/http://rebecca-melancon.com/ pilates teacher
- swlabuyahome.net
- swlalistmyhome.net
- rebeccaworking4yousite.com
- mylakecharlescityguide.com
- swlalistmyhome.com
- rebeccaworking4you.com
- swlabuyahome.com
- calcasieuhouses.com web.archive.org/web/20111013212502/http://calcasieuhouses.com/. Wordpress. Copyright Rebecca Melancon, Equal Housing Opportunity.
Message from Rebecca
Welcome to Calcasieu Houses! Here you will find not only information about Real Estate in Calcasieu Parish & the Lake Charles area, but also information about the area itself. I am constantly adding content so please check back often. I can help you with relocation, buying, selling, as well as looking for a great restaurant or a new activity to do! There will be information on Lake Charles, Sulphur, Westlake, & Moss Bluff. If you have something you would like to see added to the website, please feel free to contact me!
- mydailynewsreport.com. Hit.
- plugged-into-news.net: Godfrey Hubbard. Searching tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for two terms "Godfrey" "Hubbard" gives a small list of 20 domains including plugged-into-news.net. They all appear to have both words in them. Searching just "Hubbard, Godfrey" has only 3 hits:so it seems to match the strings exactly!
- hubbardgodfrey.online
- plugged-into-news.net
- hubbardgodfrey.com
- alljohnny.net: L. Glaze. tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search "Glaze, L." has
- godaddy without domainsbyproxy.com: a few of the websites are registered in Godaddy without domainsbyproxy. These might be the ones that gives out the most information:
- baocontact.com
How on Earth did did Citizen Labs find what seems to be a DNS fingerprint??? Are there simply some very rare badly registered domains? What did they see!
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.