Anyone else curious how many domains redirect to microsoft.com?

[Drakinite_]

Microsoft has bought many look-alike domains, like microsoft.net, microsof.com, microsofr.com, micrsoft.com, etc. which just redirect to microsoft.com, which was pointed out in ThioJoe's recent video on .zip domains. That got me wondering... How many are there? It would be time consuming to look through all permutations of microsoft.com and check all of them.

Anyone know how to look through a WHOIS database for every domain registered by Microsoft Corporation? Most WHOIS services only let you search for a domain or IP address, not for a specific organization/owner.

[Alex Atkin UK]

36 minutes ago, Drakinite_ said:

Microsoft has bought many look-alike domains, like microsoft.net, microsof.com, microsofr.com, micrsoft.com, etc. which just redirect to microsoft.com, which was pointed out in ThioJoe's recent video on .zip domains. That got me wondering... How many are there? It would be time consuming to look through all permutations of microsoft.com and check all of them.

Anyone know how to look through a WHOIS database for every domain registered by Microsoft Corporation? Most WHOIS services only let you search for a domain or IP address, not for a specific organization/owner.

Its not a simple thing to find out as microsoft.com is hosted across various IP addresses and may even be across different CDNs.

 

There's no real connection between one domain and another other than the IP addresses its registered to and according to this site there are 17,746 domains (possibly every single domain Microsoft own, or at least ones hosting user facing websites) pointing to IP address 20.112.52.29, one of those being microsoft.com.

 

What it actually displays in a browser is down to what domain you are accessing it via and probably gets proxied to a different server entirely, depending on which domain you are asking for.

 

With a huge corporation like Microsoft the IP addresses we see are likely just the relay server, which sends the request onwards to its final destination, without us seeing exactly where that is.  There's almost certainly things like DDoS protection somewhere in that path too.

 

I have to admit, it kinda surprised me to see that tracerouting microsoft.com from the UK goes across the US.  I would have expected them to have a regional cache.  But then what we can see from our simple tools might not tell the whole picture.