AS15185 HIBBERT-EAST

A netname holding two carrier names at once, and reverse names that label the test environment.

What it's used for

• A marketing services company's network. Three IPv4 prefixes announced from the United States, no IPv6, and two observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Two of the three blocks are registered to a carrier, not to the holder, with netnames that name the current carrier, mark the entry as legacy, name the company it acquired, add a product word and end in a counter.
• The third block is registered to the holder under a six-letter abbreviation of its own name.
• Four of nine sampled addresses answered. Two are carrier-generated names encoding the address and the product; the other two are functional names under two further domains, neither matching the holder or the carrier.
• Both functional names carry a label marking the host as a testing environment, and one of them names a client brand in front of it.

Interesting

• A netname that stacks a carrier, an acquisition and a product is a record written by a merger. It survives because rewriting it would mean reissuing the assignment, so the acquired brand stays visible in public data long after it left the market.
• Publishing test hosts in reverse DNS hands out a map. Anyone resolving the block learns which addresses run staging systems, which tend to carry weaker credentials and older code. Adding a customer's brand to that label names who is affected.
• Two of three blocks borrowed from a carrier is a small company routing for continuity, not scale.