US .gov WHOIS Info Restricted Over Attacker Fears

An anonymous reader writes "VeriSign Inc has stopped providing access to information about the .gov internet domain, which is restricted to US government bodies, over concerns the data could be used in planning internet attacks."

Comments

Talk about a non-news item...

[jea6]

If you need whois data for a ".gov" domain, go to the General Services Administration.

Had to remove directions from website as well

[ShaggusMacHaggis]

I work for the government, and we had to remove the directions to our office from our website. Didn't quite understand this..since we have our address on our website and all you need is something like mapquest to get directions. Makes no sense.

Re:Why now?

[zenyu]

Actually, why do we have whois records for any domain?

To catch hackers.

When someone breaks into a a computer on your network, calling the owner of the domain can help you find the bastard. Or stop him in his tracks if he picks up the phone. You could probably get the same info by figuring out the ISP from their IP address or the route, then calling the ISP. This is probably even more accurate, but directness is good. Esp if the computer you see is just the first hop along the way to the bastard.

Re:Are they going to...

[Mike Schiraldi]

They're not hiding the whois information, they're hiding the zone file, which contains just two bits of information for each domain:

What the names of their nameservers are
What the IPs of their nameservers are

You can still look this up via DNS, but it takes much, much longer.

Re:I see no problem with this...

[DragonMagic]

I'd like to point out that the government's nic is still available, only Verisign, a non-government corporation, removed their database of .gov from public view.