Security

The ports we are discussing in this post are virtual (software based) places where network connections start and end. All communication that happens over the internet is exchanged via ports.

What you need to know about open ports to protect your business

Cybersecurity

Software

Domains

In 2014 geographical top-level domains (TLDs) were introduced to enable the association between a domain and a geographical, geopolitical or ethnic community. GeoTLDs comprise geographically diverse areas including islands (e.g., .corsica), cities (e.g., .doha), federal states (e.g., .nrw) and even entire continents (.africa).

Exploring cityTLDs: Adventures of online travel

TLDs

domains

Web trends

Clickjacking tricks a user into performing an action they don’t intend to carry out such as clicking on a disguised webpage element. As a result, the user may enter a fake but similar looking website, have his personal information stolen through fake text boxes on top of the real ones or unintentionally spread malware, worms or scams.

What is clickjacking and how can you prevent it?

GDPR

Data privacy

What is DNS and what does it do? Let’s find out what the most commonly used DNS name server is according to our data.

Most commonly used DNS name servers on the internet

Tech news

Tech

A common problem in the online advertizing world is domain spoofing. Placing an ads.txt file on your website is a simple and effective solution to prevent this. Find out what ads.txt is and how you can use it to prevent ad fraud in this Insights article.

What is ads.txt and why is it important?

Technology detection

The domain extension .com, operated by Verisign (Nasdaq: VRSN) which also runs .net, is without doubt the largest and most well-known top-level domain (TLD), comprising more than 160 million websites.

A comprehensive overview of the .com top-level domain

.com

Community

Dataprovider.com Insights is live, the place you find data intelligence that is relevant to your industry. We structure the largest source of unstructured data and it would almost feel like a crime not to share some of the insights we get from our data.

Dataprovider.com Insights is live!

Announcement

How many WordPress sites are vulnerable to security risks? Every month, we index all domains on the web and detect content management systems (CMSs) on websites. Companies all over the world use a CMS to create, store and manage content on their websites.

Outdated WordPress versions and security vulnerabilities

WordPress

Seven short interviews with some of the amazing women at Dataprovider.com are in the spotlight today. Needless to say, we’re celebrating all women in our team: Edine, Jeanine, Lucia, Maaike, Marjolein, Andreea and Andriana.

Celebrating women at Dataprovider.com II

People

Public Sector

Brand Protection

Asset Management

Ports were invented to reroute different processes. For example, surfing the web always uses port 80 and port 443, port 25 is used for sending emails. Currently, there are 65,535 ports. They make network connections efficient because they let your computer know what to do with the data. 

Cyber criminals can exploit open ports to gain access by sending malicious traffic through them with the intention to take control or steal sensitive information. This is sometimes compared to a thief that checks every door of a house to see if one hasn’t been locked. Out of the more than 60,000 ports only a few that are actively used should be kept open. 

We do port scans for our clients with the intention to improve security. We check ports that are commonly used in popular applications like MySQL, PostgreSQL or Remote Desktop. From that data we can see that the majority of sites (61%) have fewer than six open ports. However, the data also suggests that there are around 2.4 million domains worldwide that have more than 80 open ports. Among these, 23% are business or e-commerce sites. 

What can you do to protect open ports? One way to address this is by implementing firewalls. These can be either software, like a program you install on your computer, or hardware. Next, you should determine how many ports you have open and whether all of these need to be open. Closing ports is like shutting the door on cyber criminals, so it’s important to regularly monitor and evaluate your website’s open ports.  

Domain registrars and registries could also use this kind of data to prevent security breaks and hacks into their users' websites by checking and warning their clients if a firewall isn't configured right and to inform them of the number of open ports.

Cyber criminals can exploit open ports to gain access by sending malicious traffic through them with the intention to take control.

How to

Fact Checking with Chris

Cryptocurrencies

COVID-19

OpenSSL

Bitcoin

News

Placeholders

Not all domains have a website. Christian, one of our co-founders, shares insights into the landscape and ideas on how to ensure high renewal rates.

Domains that don't have a website yet

Domain series

Since social media platforms can help companies connect with their customers, increase brand awareness or boost leads and sales, can we assume that all companies with a website would also use social media?

Do most companies mention their social media profiles on their website?

Fact Checking With Chris

Are most companies protected against phishing and spam? Let's find out in this "Fact Checking With Chris."

Is the majority of companies protected against phishing and spam?

email

Making the right dataset is complex. That’s why we’ve created Recipes: prefiltered datasets tailored to your question and industry that make it incredibly easy to find what technologies are used on the web.

Introducing Recipes

Recipes

Features

Is there a shift from in-person to online shopping? Can we see this in the number of online shops that also have a physical location? Let's find out in this "Fact Checking With Chris."

Do most online stores have a physical store as well?

Prof. Dr. Michael D. König explains how he used web data from Dataprovider.com to research how companies were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

How were companies affected during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Collaborations

Academic research

 Improve the security and email delivery of domains

Domains that use email and SPF

Last weekend we participated in Techstars Startup Weekend Groningen and, as always, it was awesome! 

What you need to know about open ports to protect your business

Industries

A comprehensive overview of the .com top-level domain