As part of WhoisXML API’s efforts to continuously improve its products and services, the coverage and quality of the Newly Registered Domains (NRD2) Data Feed significantly improved over the past months. More precisely, the latest Q3 2023 measurements show that the data feed’s coverage increased by 89% since the last quarter of 2022.
Within the next months, we will stop supporting Newly Registered Domain (NRD) 1.0 and steadily continue user migration to NRD 2.0, an upgraded version with more comprehensive data coverage and event monitoring than ever before.
Domain names go through a life cycle that begins during their registration and ends when they expire. The minimum domain registration period usually lasts one year. After that, owners or registrants must go through the renewal process unless they opt for automatic renewal that many registrars offer. That said, many domains could still end up on just-dropped domain lists for the following reasons:
Regardless of the reason, monitoring them can serve various purposes. This blog post tackles these use cases and the ways to find just-dropped domains.
An early line of defense for companies that want to protect their staff or customers from bogus websites is to monitor new domain registrations. Threat actors often use variations of well-known domain names to lure unsuspecting users to fake portals to steal their private information or drop malware onto their devices.
There are a few ways users can watch out for new domain names that closely resemble their existing websites or their customers’ or suppliers’ sites. But before we dive into them, let’s review why monitoring new domain registrations is essential.
WhoisXML API’s Newly Registered & Just Expired Domains Database service has a new and improved version called “NRD 2.0.” Among other improvements, it offers better coverage and is easier to use than its predecessor. Learn more about NRD 2.0 in this guide.
In the first part of this blog, we demonstrated how to download data from WhoisXML API’s daily data feeds right after their publication by using the recently introduced RSS feed as the activator of download. In particular, we showed how to download the list of domains newly registered in the .com top-level domain (TLD).
Now, to make the task a bit more interesting we demonstrate the use of our domain list with a showcase application: we calculate the list of the most frequent English words in the domain names on that day. This can be interesting in various applications. Domainers, for instance, can get information on the newest trends in domain registrations. Journalists and researchers can get a clue on a topic gaining popularity, etc.
This technical blog aims to demonstrate how to download data from WhoisXML API’s daily data feeds right after their publication. Obtaining lists of newly registered domains and their WHOIS data can be critical in many applications. (We will showcase such an application in the second part of this blog.) Recently an RSS feed has been introduced for the service that informs about data publication immediately, which makes this easy. As a demonstration, we shall go through a particular task: download the list of domains newly registered in the .com top-level domain (TLD).
We will use a Linux system and its understanding requires intermediate programming and command-line skills. We will use BASH but it is also easy to modify for zsh, which is the default on Mac OS X. We assume Python, with pip and virtualenv.
It’s generally agreed that newly registered domains are potential sources of threats. After all, many of these domain registrations are made opportunistically—sometimes even in bulk, following public announcements and global events. While not all of these domains have to be avoided at all costs, they certainly deserve more scrutiny than others that have been established for years.
The good news is that monitoring newly registered domains is doable with the help of the Newly Registered & Just Expired Domains Database.
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