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US .gov WHOIS Info Restricted Over Attacker Fears

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the paranoia-strikes-again dept.

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."

5 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. It probably isn't a hard thing to find... by sm0kes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm sure somewhere out on the Internet (Google.com comes to mind) the information is cached. How many times has information been available after lawsuits, infringements, and a range of other problems? How often are people able to get their email addresses of spam lists once it starts? I'm not going to be the one to post this information, but it's just something to think about...

  2. The FAQ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I guess the FAQ needs to be changed at whois.nic.gov:
    What is WHOIS?

    The .GOV WHOIS database is a tool that provides users with the ability to lookup records in the registrar database. Using WHOIS, you can search for people, name servers, and domains. From a UNIX system, you can use the -h option to point to the .GOV WHOIS server, nic.gov. For example, to find out about gsa.gov, use the following command: "WHOIS -h nic.gov gsa.gov".

    (posted anonymously to avoid karma-whoring)

  3. Re:Well by IIRCAFAIKIANAL · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What, you mean the US should do it like the rest of us?

    www.theregister.co.uk

    www.hrdc-drhc.gc.ca

    But the USA is the Internet, right? That's why you have .gov, .com, and .net instead of .gov.us, .co.us, and .net.us

    It's always bugged me a bit, especially when companies in my country use .com instead of .ca - I always try .ca by default and many of them don't have the .ca even in use to point to the .com.

    I honestly don't know if there is even a TLD for the USA...

    --
    Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
  4. Why now? by Ctrl-Z · · Score: 3, Interesting


    So, I read the attached article, and I understand what Verisign is doing. My question is: why? What is the motivation behind them blocking access to these whois records?

    I agree with the article in saying "It seems so logical to take that .gov WHOIS info offline that you have to wonder why it wasn't done last year. After all, who really needs to do WHOIS look ups on government sites except hackers, mail spammers that are harvesting government email addresses and fearful folks who like checking where the IP's of mysterious visitors to their web sites originate from...". But then why are they doing this now? Has Verisign been motivated by the government?

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

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  5. Bad headline by Mike+Schiraldi · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If you read the article, you'll see that this has nothing to do with WHOIS (which contains information on the name, address, etc of the person who owns the domain). It's about the DNS zone file, which looks something like this:
    slashdot.org. NS NS1.OSDN.COM.
    slashdot.org. NS NS2.OSDN.COM.
    slashdot.org. NS NS3.OSDN.COM.
    NS1.OSDN.COM. A 64.28.67.51
    NS2.OSDN.COM. A 209.192.217.106
    NS3.OSDN.COM. A 64.28.67.53
    That's all it contains for each domain -- the names and addresses of their DNS servers. Nothing more.
    --

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