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".
- hupo.com: e.g. static.hupo.com/expdomain_myadmin/2012-03-06(国际域名).txt. Heavily IP throttled. Tor hindered more than helped.First known working day:
2011-07-29
.Scraping script: cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hupo.sh. Scraping does about 1 day every 5 minutes relatively reliably, so about 36 hours / year. Not bad.Results are stored undertmp/humo/<day>
.Check for hit overlap:The hits are very well distributed amongst days and months, at least they did a good job hiding these potential timing fingerprints. This feels very deliberately designed.grep -Fx -f <( jq -r '.[].host' ../media/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json ) cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tmp/hupo/*
There are lots of hits. The data set is very inclusive. Also we understand that it must have been obtains through means other than Web crawling, since it contains so many of the hits.Nice output format for scraping as the HTML is very minimalThey randomly changed their URL format to remove the space before the .com after 2012-02-03:Some of their files are simply missing however unfortunately, e.g. neither of the following exist:webmasterhome.cn did contain that one however: domain.webmasterhome.cn/com/2012-07-01.asp. Hmm. we might have better luck over there then?2018-11-19 is corrupt in a new and wonderful way, with a bunch of trailing zeros:ends in:wget -O hupo-2018-11-19 'http://static.hupo.com/expdomain_myadmin/2018-11-19%EF%BC%88%E5%9B%BD%E9%99%85%E5%9F%9F%E5%90%8D%EF%BC%89.txt hd hupo-2018-11-19
000ffff0 74 75 64 69 65 73 2e 63 6f 6d 0d 0a 70 31 63 6f |tudies.com..p1co| 00100000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 0018a5e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.........|
More generally, several files contain invalid domain names with non-ASCII characters, e.g. 2013-01-02 contains365<D3>л<FA><C2><CC>.com
. Domain names can only contain ASCII charters: stackoverflow.com/questions/1133424/what-are-the-valid-characters-that-can-show-up-in-a-url-host Maybe we should get rid of any such lines as noise.Some files around 2011-09-06 start with an empty line. 2014-01-15 starts with about twenty empty lines. Oh and that last one also has some trash bytes the end<B7><B5><BB><D8>
. Beauty. - webmasterhome.cn: e.g. domain.webmasterhome.cn/com/2012-03-06.asp. Appears to contain the exact same data as "static.hupo.com"First known working day:
2011-08-18
.Also heavily IP throttled, and a bit more than hupo apparently.Also has some randomly missing dates like hupo.com, though different missing ones from hupo, so they complement each other nicely.Some of the URLs are broken and don't inform that with HTTP status code, they just replace the results with some Chinese text 无法找到该页 (The requested page could not be found):Several URLs just return length 0 content, e.g.:It is not fully clear if this is a throttling mechanism, or if the data is just missing entirely.curl -vvv http://domain.webmasterhome.cn/com/2015-10-31.asp * Trying 125.90.93.11:80... * Connected to domain.webmasterhome.cn (125.90.93.11) port 80 (#0) > GET /com/2015-10-31.asp HTTP/1.1 > Host: domain.webmasterhome.cn > User-Agent: curl/7.88.1 > Accept: */* > < HTTP/1.1 200 OK < Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2023 15:12:23 GMT < Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 < X-Powered-By: ASP.NET < Content-Length: 0 < Content-Type: text/html < Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDCSTTTBAD=BGGPAONBOFKMMFIPMOGGHLMJ; path=/ < Cache-control: private < * Connection #0 to host domain.webmasterhome.cn left intact
Starting around 2018, the IP limiting became very intense, 30 mins / 1 hour per URL, so we just gave up. Therefore, data from 2018 onwards does not contain webmasterhome.cn data.Starting from2013-05-10
the format changes randomly. This also shows us that they just have all the HTML pages as static files on their server. E.g. with:we see:grep -a '<pre' * | s
2013-05-09:<pre style='font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; '><strong>2013<C4><EA>05<D4><C2>09<C8>յ<BD><C6>ڹ<FA><BC><CA><D3><F2><C3><FB></strong><br>0-3y.com 2013-05-10:<pre><strong>2013<C4><EA>05<D4><C2>10<C8>յ<BD><C6>ڹ<FA><BC><CA><D3><F2><C3><FB></strong>
- justdropped.com: e.g. www.justdropped.com/drops/010112com.html. First known working day:
2006-01-01
. Unthrottled. - yoid.com: e.g.: yoid.com/bydate.php?d=2016-06-03&a=a. First known workding day:
2016-06-01
.
Data comparison:
- 2012-01-01Looking only at the
.com
:The lists are quite similar however.- webmastercn has just about ten extra ones than justdropped, the rest is exactly the same
- justdropped has some extra and some missing from hupo
Considering toplevels:- hupo has several toplevels that webmastercn does not have, e.g. .org and many others
- justdropped only covers exactly 6 tlds:
.us
,.org
,.net
,.info
,.com
and.biz
. The.com
lists are very similar to hupo + webmastercn. But it has a lot more non-.com
domains apparently.
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:
- archive.org/details/expired-domain-names-by-day
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-* repos:
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2006
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2007
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2008
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2009
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2010
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2011 (~11M)
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2012 (~18M)
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2013 (~28M)
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2014 (~29M)
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2015 (~28M)
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2016
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2017
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2018
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2019
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2020
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2021
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2022
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2023
- github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2024
- 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:
- "Information Security Specialist at Forcepoint"
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":produces per-year results for the regex term OK lets:
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh mydir 'news|global' 2011 2019
news|global
between the years under:tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2011
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2012
./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 and a few more. It's amazing.
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
etchablock.com was presumably an inscription service that allowed people to pay to have Base58 messages inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The service failed to gain popularity and not much is known about it. justdropped.com marks the domain as having expired on 2013-02-03.[ref].
The first known mentions of the service date back to December 2011, when it started self-advertizing in the blockchain around tx 8ffacbb18f63576fe323cbf2acc6c4c01c86aadf13d8352cfdd39d91916d98c8, block 156164 (2011-12-05) by repeating the following 3 messages 80 times:decoding to:
11EtchABLockDotComGivesYouXZHcYVz
11BLockChain1mmortaLityXXXXYRZD5m
11VisitEtchABLockDotComNowXTbeZZ9
etchablock.com gives you blockchain immortaility. Visit etchablock.com now.
The website was down as of 2021, and there are were decent archives unfortunately: web.archive.org/web/20130301000000*/http://etchablock.com/.
Some surviging online mentions include:
- www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/s9cra/comment/c4d5x9b/ Gold, Silver, and Bitcoin spot prices are now only a call (or text) away (2012-04-14) suggests that the creator is a "Jonathan Ryan Owens" since user jonathanryanowens comments:Some profiles:
Aside from Bitcoinduit, which was the first project we worked on for the purpose of investigating the inner workings of the bitcoin network and double spend threats? Ok.. here's a few: We developed custom bitcoin signing agents (etchablock.com), we did the first facebook bitcoin wallet (yougotcoin.com), we have our own custom c++ libraries that completely reimplement bitcoind for our own applications, we have an actual working double spend detection and alerter infrastructure, and also a coming slew of apps related to microlending and fixed exchange services..
- bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53752.msg651512#msg651512 says on 2011-12-15:by user TT.
Try etchablock.com!
- dune.com/queries/3857233 has a random looking commented out mention of
etchablock.com
on the SQL