Unveiling Interests and Trends Using The DNS

The domain name system (DNS) is a distributed database system that allows numeric IP addresses used in the Internet protocol suite to be associated with human-readable names. Often perceived as a hidden legacy service on which the Internet is funded, the DNS can instead be a rich source of data when looking at usage records. This paper describes the design and implementation of a passive DNS monitoring system developed by the authors and used to monitor the .it country code code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). Focus of this work is not to monitor the DNS service per-se, but rather exploit the DNS system for understanding evolving trends and interests of Internet users, as well identify economical relationships.