Autonomous system
AS11417 NIU
Education ARIN
Summary
Northern Illinois University
education university legacy
NIU is Northern Illinois University, the public research university in DeKalb, Illinois. It announces exactly one prefix, the university's own /16 at 131.156.0.0/16, worth 65,536 addresses, behind 4 observed BGP neighbours.
What it's used for
Campus networking for a university of roughly 15,000 students. The /16 is registered in ARIN as NIU-NET to Northern Illinois University, and it is the only thing this AS originates. A single classful-era /16 announced whole, with no deaggregation and no borrowed blocks, is the cleanest possible university signature: the school was allocated a large block in the early academic-internet era and has never needed to fragment or supplement it.
That /16 carries everything a campus puts on the network: academic and administrative systems, the library, research and lab machines, residence-hall and campus wireless clients, and public-facing web and mail. Universities of this vintage routinely still hand routable addresses to end hosts rather than NATing everything, which is why a 15,000-student school sits on 65,536 addresses without strain.
Notable
Four neighbours is the multihoming profile of a campus, not a carrier. Public universities in Illinois typically take transit from a state or regional research-and-education network alongside commercial upstreams, which is what a handful of adjacencies against a single /16 looks like. NIU sells no transit and originates nobody else's space.
No PTRs came back for the two addresses sampled. Two addresses out of 65,536 is a sample, not a finding, and no inference is drawn from it.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-15, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 1 prefixes · 65.54K addresses IPv6 0 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| US | United States of America | 1 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- ARIN
- Handle
AS11417- Registry name
- NIU
- Registrant
- Northern Illinois University
- Abuse contact
- abuse@niu.edu
- Registered
- 1998-08-17
- Last changed
- 2012-08-30
- Allocation
- assigned
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 0% valid · 0 valid, 1 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 0 authorising AS11417
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 1 of 1 announcements
- Route objects
- 1 naming AS11417
Reputation
Classification and threat
Education University, school or national research and education network.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 442 networks and 1,782 prefixes, as published 2026-10-16. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere