.RU and .РФ Registries Stop Disclosing Legal Entity Domain Owners in WHOIS
The registries responsible for .RU and .РФ domains have stopped publishing information about legal-entity administrators in the public WHOIS service. Until recently the records included both the official name of the organization and its INN tax identification number; the same fields now contain only the single word Organization.
The modification was detected on 22 July by Habr contributor @ifap. One illustrative case is the domain formerly shown as belonging to Russia’s Federal Protective Service; the record now withholds any identifying details.
Because the change affects every legal-entity registration, investigators can no longer determine at a glance which company or state body controls a given domain. Locating the actual administrator therefore requires additional open-source research or formal requests.
Representatives of the Coordination Center stated that the data are temporarily unavailable for technical reasons. They declined to specify which component failed or how long the outage is expected to last, and they offered no assurance that the previous fields will reappear.
One hypothesis circulating among observers is that the registry is being re-engineered to comply with updated authentication rules for domain administrators. No official confirmation of this explanation has been issued.
Prior to the change, WHOIS queries provided a fast and reliable method for identifying the corporate or governmental entity behind any .RU or .РФ domain. The current format effectively reveals only that the registrant is an organization rather than an individual, leaving all further identification to external investigation.
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