[registrars] ALERT: ProspectMiner

[Rick Wesson <wessorh@ar.com>]

Registrars:

Your whois is being mined, well you probably already knew that. If you
happen to have a web interface that allows someone to browse whois via the
web, a company named update.com probably knows how to mine your whois.

A snipit from their marketing lit...

You enter a few example companies typifying your market, and
update.prospectminer searches across the World Wide Web identifying all
the companies within your specified market.

update.prospectminer then goes to thousands of "live" online web sources
extracting key sales intelligence including today´s decision-makers and
influencers. Only the freshest information is delivered.

You can also use the power of update.prospectminer to update your customer
database, or other sources such as inbound web leads or prospects from
marketing events.

If you want to see more check out http://www.update.com and
http://www.update.com/products/pm_en.html

I just filteres several websites mining our whois and placed some calls
one of which the network security guy found that his marketing department
had just started running the application called ProspectMiner and that
what was generating the queries.

I'm going to place some calls to the update.com folks and explain that
what theyare doing violates the AUP on just about every whois server out
there.

best,

-rick