Dear colleagues, On 4th March along with the Whois 1.121 release to production, we also plan to remove MD5 hashed passwords from all IRT objects. This has already been done for all MNTNER objects in January. On 14th January, we informed 171 affected IRT maintainers that we will remove all passwords from IRT objects following the next Whois release, and also notified the DB-WG: https://mailman.ripe.net/archives/list/db-wg@ripe.net/message/WQWBPPB2AMTVI7... We plan to email the remaining 135 affected IRT maintainers today to remind them of the plan and announce the specific date. We have asked the maintainers to switch to an alternative authentication method, including X.509, PGP or SSO. MD5 hashed passwords in IRT objects are used to authenticate adding an mnt-irt: reference to IRT objects in inet(6)num objects. This has only been done a handful of times this year, so we expect the impact to be low. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments on this plan. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC