Security professionals mourn the loss of Whois data post GDPR, DomainTools survey says

Over 50% of security professionals surveyed think the changes to Whois will make the Internet a safer place for scammers

DomainTools, a leader in domain name and DNS-based cyber threat intelligence, today announced the results of a survey of 326 security professionals conducted at Infosecurity Europe, regarding the impact of GDPR on important cybersecurity functions such as network defense, threat hunting and risk assessment.

GDPR, which came into effect in May, has resulted in the redaction of certain PII data available in Whois records. This data was invaluable to security researchers as they endeavor to keep global internet users safe online. 86% of the security professionals surveyed were aware that GDPR has affected Whois data and 58% said that it will help make the Internet ‘a safer place for scammers’.

“The results of this survey show that the security community understands just how significant Whois data is to the important work they do”, said Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools. “The Internet is an open network, fundamentally operating on trust. Helping to enforce that trust are systems like Whois that give individual internet users insight into who is behind a website. Applied at scale, Whois data empowers everyday security capabilities such domain and IP risk assessment and spam protection. We will continue to work as hard as we can to make sure security practitioners are included in the law as parties with a legitimate interest in the full Whois data.””

While the impact of the current Whois data redaction is being felt throughout the community, DomainTools continues to evolve its products to support security customers with other relevant and effective data sets, including the recent launch of Iris 3.0, adding Guided Pivots, SSL Certificate Profiles and historical reverse Whois support to keep up with the ever-changing threat landscape.

Over 50% of security professionals surveyed think the changes to Whois will make the Internet a safer place for scammers

DomainTools, a leader in domain name and DNS-based cyber threat intelligence, today announced the results of a survey of 326 security professionals conducted at Infosecurity Europe, regarding the impact of GDPR on important cybersecurity functions such as network defense, threat hunting and risk assessment.

GDPR, which came into effect in May, has resulted in the redaction of certain PII data available in Whois records. This data was invaluable to security researchers as they endeavor to keep global internet users safe online. 86% of the security professionals surveyed were aware that GDPR has affected Whois data and 58% said that it will help make the Internet ‘a safer place for scammers’.

“The results of this survey show that the security community understands just how significant Whois data is to the important work they do”, said Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools. “The Internet is an open network, fundamentally operating on trust. Helping to enforce that trust are systems like Whois that give individual internet users insight into who is behind a website. Applied at scale, Whois data empowers everyday security capabilities such domain and IP risk assessment and spam protection. We will continue to work as hard as we can to make sure security practitioners are included in the law as parties with a legitimate interest in the full Whois data.””

While the impact of the current Whois data redaction is being felt throughout the community, DomainTools continues to evolve its products to support security customers with other relevant and effective data sets, including the recent launch of Iris 3.0, adding Guided Pivots, SSL Certificate Profiles and historical reverse Whois support to keep up with the ever-changing threat landscape.