AS14799 EXP-EC2000

A credit bureau's network, cut into 20 pieces, with a handle that carries a year nobody needs any more.

What it's used for

• A credit reporting agency's network. 63,488 addresses across 20 IPv4 prefixes, with two observed BGP neighbours and no IPv6 announced.

Notable

• Every record retrieved carries the netname EXPERIAN, registered to Experian with a technical contact.
• Nineteen prefixes sit inside 167.107, from a /17 down to several /24s; the twentieth is 205.174.34.0/24.
• The AS handle is EXP-EC2000.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.
• Two registry lookups failed, for 167.107.128.0/17 and 167.107.88.0/21.

Interesting

• The handle ends in four digits that read as a year, which dates the record to a project or a reorganisation that mattered at the time and means nothing now. Handles are permanent in practice, so they preserve whatever was topical on the day of the application.
• Twenty announcements out of one range, down to individual /24s, is a network divided by processing environment rather than by office. Bureaus keep the systems that receive data, the ones that hold it and the ones that answer queries apart, and that separation is visible from outside.
• Nothing answers a reverse lookup, on any of the 20 blocks. For a network holding credit files, publishing hostnames would be describing the estate to anyone who asked.
• Two neighbours. The traffic arrives over private arrangements with lenders rather than across the public internet, so the public footprint stays small.