By Kieren McCarthy for The
Register.
This article has been reproduced with permission.
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.
According to Daley, Head claimed to have a database of 130m
domain names across the world, with Whois data on 70m of them. When
the company identifies a domain name that is being used for
nefarious purposes it runs a search across its database for any
other domains run or owned by the same organisation and reviews
their status.
The company's use of the information is immaterial, however, as
under European law the Whois database is the copyrighted property
of Nominet.
Nominet is particularly sensitive about its database after
Australian scammers tricked 50,000 Nominet customers into paying
imaginary renewal fees when they were contacted through their Whois
details, stolen from the Nominet website by an automated request
program.
Brad Norrish and Chesley Rafferty were found guilty in January
this year and fined AU$2.3m (£980,000) by an Australian court after
a Nominet chase lasting nearly three years. Nominet has since
provided all customers with the option to opt-out of providing
anything but their name on the public Whois database, and carefully
monitors access to the database.
© The Register
2006
