Fergie's Tech Blog

Nominet Warns of WHOIS Data Mining

Kieren McCarthy writes on The Register:

Nominet has issued a warning about commercial companies that are swiping copyrighted information on domain name owners from its Whois database.

Several weeks ago, the UK internet registry owner noticed a sharp increase in the number of people accessing its Whois service, an online searchable database that provides ownership details for individual .uk internet addresses, including the name of the individual and sometimes their home address.

Nominet director of IT Jay Daley said in one 24-hour period there were an additional 50,000 look-ups appearing to come from 5,000 different internet addresses. Thanks to careful monitoring and analysis, however, Nominet was able to trace the source of the requests to a single company - US security company Intrusion.com.

Nominet blocked Intrusion.com and sent an email to the company requesting an explanation, but heard nothing back. A week later, it phoned the US firm and sent another email before finally speaking to its co-founder, vice-president and vice-chairman T Joe Head, who confirmed the company had been building a database of .uk domain ownership in order to help its products perform better.

posted by Fergie @ 6/01/2006 07:34:00 AM