Getting IP adresses of competitors

Partial search possible?

[pmkpmk]

One of my competitors showed up in my logs right now. In my country, Internet-access for businesses is quite expensive, so the reality is that web-hosting is outsourced and net-access is done via DSL-lines. This means the IP-adresses they are using usually do NOT resolve to something like host.competitor.com, but rather to host.access-provider.com

The competitor in question used this scheme as well and resolved to competitorname-workstationXY.worldwide-access-provider.com.

Is there any way, I can do a wildcard-search for domain-name substrings on a worldwide basis? I would enter my competitor's names (which are - fortunately enough - pretty unique) and see if any hosts have these in their hostname.

Any other ideas to get their IP addresses?

[ajwebmaster]

have you looked at whois . sc?

Their paid area may provide the tools you are seeking.

[pmkpmk]

Yes, but they only offer this service for com/net/org but not for my tld.

[helleborine]

Have you tried "ping domain?"

That will usually reveal the IP of the domain. And check whois to see if they own an IP block.

I hope I understood your question correctly.

[incrediBILL]

if the competitor is using anything with DHCP for accessing the net, like a dial-up service, blocking by IP will out of the question. If the competitor is showing as a part of the host name as you showed above, I would try blocking based on inclusion in the host name, and hope you don't accidentally whack legit visitors.

However, if he figures out you're blocking him, he can easily change his machine name, IP address, OR with very little effort use an anonymous surfing web site to bypass your security entirely in a matter of seconds.

IMHO, not worth the trouble or the time unless you just want the exercise.