AS10655 BUREAU-NAT-AFF

BUREAU-NAT-AFF is not a government bureau. It is The Bureau of National Affairs, the Arlington, Virginia legal, tax and regulatory publisher, long employee-owned and known simply as BNA. Bloomberg acquired it in 2011, and it now trades as Bloomberg Industry Group, the parent of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax.

What it's used for

This is one of the sweep's better name traps. "Bureau of National Affairs" reads like a federal agency, and the AS sits in a low-numbered legacy range where genuine government blocks are common. It is a private media and information company, and the current holder string on the ASN says so outright.

The routing supports a corporate network rather than a provider. The AS announces 15 IPv4 prefixes totalling 3,840 addresses, no IPv6, and RIS sees five observed neighbours. A publisher of subscription legal and tax databases runs a real public-facing estate, so it wants provider-independent space multi-homed across a few upstreams, which is what five neighbours buys. A carrier of any size would show hundreds or thousands of neighbours instead.

Notable

Every announced route is a /24, and they come from two unrelated legacy ranges, 149.79.0.0 and 170.75.0.0, in scattered non-contiguous pieces. Announcing only /24s out of two parents is a deliberate style: the smallest globally accepted prefix, one per site or service, which maximises control over which upstream each destination is reached through.

Reverse DNS returned nothing on the 20 addresses sampled. That is a sample, not a finding, and no inference should be built on it.

Interesting

The publishing side of the business considerably predates the internet: BNA's roots run back to the 1920s, which makes the ASN a fairly late chapter in a long corporate story rather than the other way round.