Asset Management

Recently, Austria’s data protection watchdog reported that the use of Google Analytics is a breach of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The watchdog found that there weren’t enough safeguards put into place to protect users from being identified. 

Data privacy and web analytics tools across Europe

Technology detection

Tech news

Data privacy

Rebranding, a bucket of bad news and plummeting stocks. A lot is happening around Facebook. What can our web data tell us about the social media platform owned by Meta? Has Facebook reached its peak?

Has Facebook reached its peak?

News

Web trends

Domains

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) usually refers to a two-letter top-level domain assigned to a country, sovereign state or a dependent territory. As an example, the letters .nl have been reserved for the Netherlands, indicating that a website is most likely Dutch. 

How many ccTLDs are hosted in their own country?

TLDs

domains

A lesser-known product of Dataprovider.com is Reverse DNS Lookup. What is it and how can you leverage it? 

Reverse DNS Lookup for investment managers and security professionals

Security

How to

Tech

Yandex is the Google of Russia. They also have a Google analytics alternative that can help you understand how many visitors come to your website. 

The problem with Russian Yandex trackers on European and American websites

Community

Seven short interviews with some of the amazing women at Dataprovider.com are in the spotlight today. Needless to say, we’re celebrating each and every one of them, including those who aren’t featured in this story: Samantha, Jeanine, Andriana and Andreea. 

Celebrating women at Dataprovider.com I

People

Brand Protection

Your corporate portfolio probably contains thousands of domain names. How can you ensure they’re always protected?

How to use web data in your online brand protection strategy?

In early March, contractors working for Google to translate texts for the Russian market received an update: “Effective immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as ‘extraordinary circumstances.’" 

Can we monitor how Russian censorship is spreading on the web?

As a registrar, how do you gain insights into what is happening on newly registered domains during the first three months after the registration? How do you keep track if the thousands of domains that have been registered remain placeholders or create online stores that need an SSL certificate?

How do you monitor what’s happening on newly registered domains?

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

Public Sector

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.

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

Announcement

Fact Checking with Chris

Cryptocurrencies

COVID-19

OpenSSL

Bitcoin

Placeholders

WordPress

GDPR

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! 