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What is dnstwister?

dnstwister generates a list of domain names that are similar to one that you provide, checking to see if any of them are registered.

Why use dnstwister?

dnstwister can tell you if someone may be using a domain like yours for malicious purposes like phishing or trademark infringement.

For instance as the owner of the domain dnstwister.report I would be very interested to know if someone registered the ‘dnstw1ster.report’ domain and started sending malicious password-reset emails to users.

dnstwister makes it trivial to answer that exact question.

Email alerts

So you don’t have to keep coming back and running searches, dnstwister can also alert you via Email within 24 hours if a new domain is registered like yours, if an existing domain has changed IP address or has even been unregistered. To subscribe you simply click on the appropriate icon after performing a search.

“Noisy” domains

Some domains change IP address all the time, or are constantly registered then unregistered. This is almost always due to the domain being parked. You can hide these domains from your email alerts by ticking the “Ignore domains that change all the time.” box when signing up.

Ticking this box will improve the quality of the alerts you get, ensuring the important alerts aren’t lost in the noise.

In the future existing subscribers will be able to change this setting too.

How it works

Let’s say you do a dnstwister search on www.example.com.

Firstly, dnstwister will generate a list of similar domains - something like:

www.examplea.com
www.examplec.com
...
www.axample.com
...

(you can thank dnstwist for that awesome algorithm)

For each of these domains, dnstwister will attempt to resolve a DNS A record - the mapping between a domain name and an IP address. This will look something like:

Successfully resolving a domain to an IP address indicates someone has registered it.

API

We have a JSON API available for you to play with, if you’re keen.