A single website can be a portal to uncover ownership, related sites, social media accounts, phone numbers, emails, corporate entities, revenue, and more.
I spend hours each year training journalists and other investigators on how to analyze website content and infrastructure, track how a site earns money, and discover who’s behind it. One of the essential skills that every investigator needs is to know how to uncover whether a site is connected to other web properties. This can potentially reveal ownership and other useful information. But it’s getting more difficult.
Here are some of the reasons why:
Whois searches are increasingly unhelpful due to the widespread use of privacy services that hide the name of a domain owner, and because privacy legislation like GDPR has reduced the amount of publicly accessible domain registrant information.
Many sites use platforms and content management systems that make it a challenge to identify unique plugins, features, and code. Squarespace, Wix, Substack and the like are heavily templated and make it more difficult to determine if the same person is running multiple sites on the platform. The same is true for ecommerce platforms like Shopify. The result is that there are fewer technical signatures and unique identifiers we can use to link sites together.
Content delivery networks like Cloudflare and Akamai shield the true IP address (and often other infrastructure) used by a site.
Google recently changed how it handles analytics IDs and tags, which complicates the standard approach for identifying sites that use the same Google Analytics ID. (Read the Indicator guide to the changes here.)
But it’s not all bad news. I’ve come across new methods and tools for fingerprinting site content and infrastructure, and for connecting sites together. That’s the focus of this guide: to outline different options for connecting websites together via shared IDs, code, content, and other elements. I’ll update it as I become aware of new approaches, or if the tools and techniques detailed below change.
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