Collected research

The Wolf of Name Street: Hijacking Domains Through Their Nameservers

Thomas Vissers, Timothy Barron, Tom Van Goethem, Wouter Joosen and Nick Nikiforakis · acmccs.github.io

Domains can be seized through their nameservers instead of directly. The authors typosquat and bitsquat nameserver hostnames and register nameserver domains left expired or stale in WHOIS, then answer DNS for every domain that trusts them. Scanning 10,000 popular nameserver domains found over 12,000 domains open to near-immediate compromise and 1.28M exposed to denial of service.

Record

Researcher

Thomas Vissers, Timothy Barron, Tom Van Goethem, Wouter Joosen and Nick Nikiforakis

Published by

acmccs.github.io

Format

Whitepaper

Topic

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In the archive

• Collected in the 2016–17 research round

Tags

• dns
• typosquatting
• large-scale-scan
• measurement-study
• dos
• owasp-a06-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Thomas Vissers, Timothy Barron, Tom Van Goethem, Wouter Joosen and Nick Nikiforakis, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 14 August 2026.