Description:
Privacy protection for Amazon Route 53 domains hides most of the contact information from "WHOIS" queries. This feature lowers the amount of spam received and redacts information like name, address, phone number, and email address.

Rationale:
Enabling privacy protection for Route 53 domains is a best practice for security and privacy. It helps to protect your domain from being spoofed or used for malicious purposes.

Impact:
Enabling privacy protection for Route 53 domains will prevent your contact information from being publicly visible. This will reduce the amount of spam you receive and make it more difficult for malicious actors to find your contact information.

Default Value:
By default, privacy protection is disabled for Route 53 domains.

Pre-requisites:
  • You must have access to the Route 53 console.
  • You must know the domain name that you want to enable privacy protection for.


Remediation Steps:
  1. Sign in to the Route 53 console.
  2. In the left navigation pane, click Domains.
  3. Click the name of the domain that you want to enable privacy protection for.
  4. In the Contact Information section, click Edit Contacts.
  5. Under Privacy Protection, select Enable.
  6. Click Save.


Test Plan:
  1. After you have enabled privacy protection, you can verify that it is working by performing a WHOIS lookup on the domain name.
  2. The WHOIS lookup should not return any contact information for the domain.

Implementation Plan:

AWS CLI:

aws route53 domains update-contact-info --domain-name example.com --privacy-protection ENABLED


AWS GUI:

  1. Sign in to the Route 53 console.
  2. In the left navigation pane, click Domains.
  3. Click the name of the domain that you want to enable privacy protection for.
  4. In the Contact Information section, select Edit Contacts.
  5. Under Privacy Protection, select Enable.
  6. Click Save.


Backout Plan:
To back out of enabling privacy protection, you can follow the same steps as the remediation steps, but select Disable instead of Enable.

Note:
  • You can enable privacy protection for all of your Route 53 domains at once by using the AWS CLI or the AWS GUI.
  • You can also disable privacy protection for a domain if you need to.


Reference:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/domain-privacy-protection.html