GDPR and Whois data

For folks who aren’t following the discussion about whois records and GDPR compliance there’s a decent summary at vice.com: What Is Going to Happen With Whois?

The problem, briefly stated, is that ICANN has agreements with the thousands of domain registrars around the globe like GoDaddy or HostGator which oblige the companies to post WHOIS data—such as names, emails, and phone numbers—for every domain registrant with their service. On the other hand, the GDPR prohibits companies from publishing information that identifies individuals, which means that when the law goes into effect in April, ICANN’s agreements with registrars about WHOIS data will be illegal, at least in Europe.

Many researchers, including those fighting online crime, malware, phishing, and spam, use whois data as a significant part of their investigations. Losing access to whois data is going to hamper those investigations.
 

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Browsers, security and paranoia

MAAWG is coming up and lots of us are working on documents, and presentations. One of the recent discussions is what kind of security recommendations, if any, should we be making. I posted a list of things including “Don’t browse the web with a machine running Windows.”
Another participant told me he thought my recommendation to not use a windows machine to browse the web was over the top and paranoid. It may be, but drive by malware attacks are increasing. Visiting big sites may not be enough to protect you, as hackers are compromising sites and installing malware to infect visitors to those sites. Some ad networks have also been used to spread malware.
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Of course, there are a lot of reasons that one might be forced to use a particular browser or operating system. For instance, I was on the phone with my bank just today to ask if they supported Safari. They say they do, but there are some things that just don’t work. The customer service rep said that they recommend Internet Explorer to all their users. She then suggested I switch browsers. No thanks, I’ll deal with the broken website.
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Some mornings I check mail from my phone. This showed up this morning.
PizzaHutMail
My first thought was “oh, no, Pizza Hut is spamming, wonder who sold them my address.”
Then I remembered that iOS is horrible and won’t show you anything other than the Friendly From and maybe it was some weird phishing scheme.
When I got to my real mail client I checked headers, and sure enough, it wasn’t really from Pizza Hut. I’m guessing actually malware, but I don’t have a forensics machine to click the link and I’m not doing it on anything I can’t wipe (and have isolated from the rest of my network).
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