What feels like the obvious connection that an Internet resource registered to Instagram or Facebook is in fact likely to be controlled by their parent company Meta, isn’t actually an obvious connection when considering only Internet registry data. Whilst in this case the connection is widely known, the same isn’t necessarily known for all cases where one company operates different legal entities each holding Internet resources, or perhaps when they’ve supplied different information to each registry.
At RIPE 90, Joshua Levett presented his latest work on WHOactuallyIS? - a tool for making these connections by crawling Internet registries, DNS records and the BGP table. Drawing previously invisible connections, it is our hope to expand on this research to improve our understanding of the Internet’s map.
You can read more about this work on the CHEDDAR Hub blog, but you can also follow the links below to watch the talk or read the short paper from the Traffic Measurement and Analysis (TMA) Conference 2025: