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End of WHOIS, thank you GDPR

May 30, 2018

As of May 25th the Whois database is dead. Be warned, this is not true for Country Whois i.e. the ccTLD like .in, .sg etc still display your personal information publicly.

I know many “Security” professionals are complaining about how GDPR has ended the Whois database and that it is a bad thing. The claim is that bad actors will hide behind anonymous registration. Sure that 1% “may” but I am also sure that the other 99% are happy to not have to pay for “Private Domain Registration” which even hackers could buy anyway.

It was just insane that all you had to do was type whois <mydomain.com> to know all my details including where I live and my phone number. It has only led to spam/harassment. I must be in thousands of databases where the only purpose is to spam and harass domain name owners.

I am one of those people who are happy with it and if you are go use #killwhois or share this post/sign in whatever to stop whois from coming back. I believe it has actually increased security. The DNS information is still being published. That is how hackers know which Provider to attack to hijack your domain name. Hackers want information and whois gives it to them freely.

For every domain name you had to pay US$5-US$7 additional to have your details taken out of Whois database and be replaced with proxy user data. Thats a huge ripoff.

When you sign up for an email address, would you want just anyone to simply get your home address, phone number etc? Do you want it public? They why for domain names when you’re already paying for it!

Whois doesn’t make sense, it never did. I hope it dies. If you don’t know about Whois and GDPR go find out.


You are welcome to connect with me. Abhishek Dujari
This is my archived blog where you will find content about early days of Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Development and Sysadmin.