Mysterious Websites On Internet
In Today’s era of Cyber Physical Systems(Industry 4.0), we often stumble upon different types of websites, although first website was started in the year 1991 at CERN by British scientist Tim Berners Lee which was dedicated as a part of World Wide Project(WWW). Since then Internet has come a long way and has been filled with various mystified & anonymous websites, usually these type of websites are generally found on Darknet, there are quite a few websites which were indexed by google and still remains mysterious and unresolved until now.
One such Internet mystery which has baffled many Hackers & Researchers is Mortis.com, Today if you type in the domain mortis.com into your search bar chances are that you will end up with a 404-error code or a plain page telling you that you are not able to reach the website. But there was a time when typing in mortis.com had a very different result.
In the early 2000s the internet was packed with many strange websites with users who documented them. As the infamous Cicada 3301 which we will come later in this blog, Mortis.com remains a mystery that does not want to be solved. Finding concrete information on mortis.com is a challenging task.
The first fact that we know for sure is that the domain went up in 1997, only being discovered by chance much later, in the early 2010. The oldest posts referencing mortis.com describes a user stumbling onto the domain before sharing their bizarre findings on 4chan forum. When the site was active in 1997 brought you to a simple landing page with a black background and a white box prompting you for a username and password. Most people at this point would simply turn away or think it may just be an admin login page of a website. The appeal on mortis.com was twofold. On one hand, the URL conjures images of mortality, with mortis being the latin word for death.
Whoever named this website either had a dark sense of humor or wanted the name to reflect something grotesque held behind the tomb of a cold Log-In screen on a black background, that was it nothing more, nothing less. It was like the website was begging to be accessed by an unauthorized user who was smart enough to crack the code.
One such user decided to snoop around the source code of this website with the curiosity to find out what was behind that login screen, sooner he realized there was something much weirder going on than just the website’s strange name and the monochromatic design. The user combed through pages and pages of code, quickly realizing that mortis.com was hosting an enormous amount of data. Some of the individual files were as large as 39 Gigabytes and the total amount of data being hosted on the website were in the range of Terabytes.
To give you an idea,
Back in early 2000s, this was a massive amount of data to be hosted on a website. Much more than most individuals would ever need or ever be able to afford. For example, in 1998, Yahoo made waves for upgrading their processing server from 7.5 TB to 24 TB. Which should give you an idea
of how much a terabyte was worth in the late ’90s. Even today, storing that much data on a website is highly impractical for ordinary consumers, the likelihood that a single individual was storing this much information back in 1997 was next to impossible.
It was the age of the internet sleuth, after all still, stranger details about the domain started to collect. Word spread about the difficulty in breaking the log-in Average consumer domains weren’t prepared to handle brute-force attacks from multiple users, where an automated bot tries to match millions of password and username combinations to break into a website. Mortis.com resisted these attempts, with none of the dozens of attempts by different users leading any closer to a breakthrough. Of course, the website’s defiance only advanced its appeal to amateur internet sleuths. Word about mortis.com spread to other boards on 4chan, inevitably reaching the paranormal board,
before appearing on Reddit and multiple amateur hacking forums. Developments in solving the mortis.com mystery.
It wasn’t a large influx of information that poured in, it was small bits,
only to disappear as they led nowhere useful or were confirmed as hoaxes. This was especially difficult, since as interest in the site grew, more and more fake posts started appearing some users claimed they had logged in to find everything from music files, to hardcore snuff videos, to classified government documents. Among all these hoaxes, a small spark appeared in the dark, a name: Thomas Ling.
Any clear information on Ling was hard to verify even including his existence, A string of clues led some users to assume that the domain was registered under the name Thomas Ling on the 14th of November 1997. This also allowed them to validate around 24 other websites under the same name and hosting company. What they found was disturbing.
First, there was Cthulhu.net which we will again touch later in this blog which gave off a similar uncanny feeling to mortis.com. Users of cthulhu.net began reaching out with what they knew, hoping to find the mysterious Ling.
A development came when one user found a Thomas Ling in Sydney, Australia. Further investigation seemed promising, even revealing an address, only for the users to discover that the property was an unowned, empty plot of land.
This strange turn in the investigation did little to deter anyone if anything, it just further added to the mystery of mortis.com, More leads on the Thomas Ling name would lead to empty warehouses and remote regions all across the globe. Some more detective work even brought up a phone number or two, but nobody ever answered and some of the Thomas Lings and associated names found down the rabbit hole ended up being people who had been deceased for years, way before the domain was registered. Users began trying to reach out to the email accounts associated with the server Blair, Igor, Mortis, Child of Chaos. However, no confirmed evidence exists of any of them ever responding. Users began combing through the information on the other associated websites. One of them was a website that is still up today, for a woman’s quilt business, another was dentalfillins.com a simple website advertising about dental.
Dentalfillins.com pointed to a Thomas Ling working as a Dentist in San Francisco. Other strings lead to a Thomas Ling working as an Attorney or to a security expert working at a high-end firm and although it seemed like the users were on the tip of finding him and his true identity, they never did. The reality of the matter is even if the users did end up finding the real Thomas Ling through these calls and emails, he seems to not wanna talk about mortis.com with a bunch of strangers from the internet. Out of respect for his privacy, many users dropped trying to contact him altogether and his identity even his existence remains unconfirmed so then, here’s what we do know about the strange website. In 1997, without a doubt, the domain mortis.com was registered under the name Thomas Ling. Whether this is the person’s real name or not, they used the same details to also register 24 other websites under the domain registration network, Pair Networks, the server being located in Philadelphia.
In 2011, the furthest discussion I found on the mortis.com mystery originated on 4chan’s /g/ forums dedicated to discussing technology there are posts in this thread that link to older mentions of mortis.com on other websites and forums, but just like the domain itself, most of these have been wiped from search engines.
In 2011 is likely also the year that mortis.com went down although it is difficult to determine exactly when thanks to most of the online sources having disappeared.
In 2013 after years of intermittent investigation the mortis.com mystery is brought up again on 4chan’s /x/ forums dedicated to the paranormal. Many sources I could find incorrectly cite the original post to come from the /x/ board and not the /g/ board which is worth noting as by the time discussion reached the paranormal board mortis.com had already been brought down. Users logged in to 4chan and Reddit to report that mortis.com seemed unresponsive only to quickly realize that others like Cthulhu were also Inaccessible.
One user claimed that Thomas Ling did reach out to him some time before this. He allegedly demanded that the hackers stop trying to hack his website and when pushed for an explanation on mortis.com claimed that the website was only used to host his wedding photos online which seems to be Unlikely considering the size of the files but it would be possible.
Today, most of the websites are still down you can still log into the quilting website but cthulhu and mortis.com are of course inaccessible someone has personally requested that both of these domains be completely wiped from internet archives. On the Wayback Machine, you will find no evidence of them. The only proof that they existed at all being that someone had personally requested for all records to be wiped.
A wiki that existed for a few years to try and document every piece of evidence on the subject is also down, compounding the difficulties in researching mortis.com after it was brought down.
So, to conclude this story I had a look through the remaining records on the mortis.com domain even though the website is down I noticed that it was slated to expire in 2020 before this could happen though, it was re-registered under the same name — Thomas Ling once again under the same domain host. This registration is valid until 2025 there is no way to be sure if Thomas Ling who registered the domain in 2020 is the same as the original as many of these hosting websites go by a policy of trust when users give their details However, a part of me still finds this explanation weird If Thomas Ling really wanted to distance himself away from the internet frenzy surrounding mortis.com I can’t understand why he would keep re-registering the domain as he did in 2020. As one person on Reddit mentions “who hosts their wedding photos under the Latin name for death?” Still, some of you wondering may have realized something unconfirmed in the timeline here.
What do you guys think hides behind the domain of death?
Here is a few links that sheds some light on this mystery: https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/12368387/
https://web.archive.org/web/20121226070556/http://chanarchive.org/4chan/x/21645/mortis
Fun Fact: mortis (μόρτης) in greek, was a person who had immunity to plague, and helped bury the dead by plague.
Thank you for Reading :)