[gnso-dow123] Presentation by Dave Piscatello: Information Gathering Using Domain Name Registration Records
Dear all, FYI I am re-sending Dave Piscatello's slides on his research on Whois records ahead of his presentation on today's Whois task force call. Dave will be joining the task force to walk us through the presentation and answer questions. As several task force members will not be able to be on today's call, Glen has arranged a transcription service so that everyone can read through the presentation in their own time. Also, Dave has kindly offered to answer email questions either individually or to the task force mailing list. Finally, a brief introduction to Dave's presentation and findings is included below. All the best, Maria Information Gathering Using Domain Name Registration Records http://hhi.corecom.com/arc20061001.htm#BlogID559 On behalf of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee, II recently completed a study of approximately 5000 domain name registration records, randomly selected from several million from com, net, and org. The purpose of my study was to approximate the extent to which personal contact information can be extracted from domain name registration information. For this study, I defined personal contact information as "sufficient attributes" to feel confident that the registrant is an individual, or an individual operating a home business. I also wanted to determine if it would be possible, using the information collected, to speak with or visit the individual at his or her residence, e.g., make personal contact. I applied the same kinds of information gathering techniques one might expect an attacker to use when he attempts to identify a target for an attack. Similar techniques might be used by a private investigator or law enforcement agent. I used a variety of databases and search tools to learn more about the registrant from the information collected by registrars and made available via a Whois query or in bulk:: * A real estate database (trulia.com) * An Internet telephone directory (whitepages.com offers reverse number lookup) * Search engines (Google, Yahoo!) * Aerial photographs of the registrant's address (GoogleEarth) * E-maps (Map Quest) * Companies and Industries directory (hoovers.com) * Web sites hosted at registered domain name * and my personal familiarity with geographic region I chose (Philadelphia, PA). I classified registrants based on a set of matching criteria, with the underlying assumption that the more criteria (out of a possible 10) that are matched, the higher my confidence would be that the registrant information identifies an individual (or business). The findings <http://www.icann.org/committees/security/information-gathering-28Sep2006.pd f> from my study are now available in presentation format at the ICANN SSAC web pages. Attachment:
information-gathering-28Sep2006.pdf
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