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WHOactuallyIS? Finding the Companies Behind the Networks

Joshua Levett, Vassilios Vassilakis, and Poonam Yadav

9th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA 2025)

Published on

Extracting accurate data from WHOIS and Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) services currently depends on the level of transparency and willingness of organisations to update their information within Internet registries, including after mergers and acquisitions. What this never shares, however, is what resources are used for, and whether their users are the same organisations as their owners. With the rise of IP leasing and long-seen prevalence of hosting platforms or PaaS providers, the information returned is not fully representative. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of identifying the companies behind networks, and our approach to building a WHOactuallyIS? service, which uses a variety of different data services to provide contextually collected information about the owners and users of Internet resources.