AS16312 SURFSAFE-AS

Seventeen blocks acquired inside six months, every one named after a company that holds none of them.

What it's used for

• A hosting provider's network. Seventeen IPv4 prefixes announced from Sweden, no IPv6, nineteen thousand four hundred and fifty-six addresses, through two observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Every sampled block uses one scheme: a country code, a six-letter brand, and a full date. That brand appears in no other field of the record.
• The dates cluster tightly. All the sampled ones fall inside a six-month window, with two pairs sharing a date exactly, so the blocks arrived in a rush rather than accumulating over years.
• Most blocks are the same size, a thousand addresses each, which is the shape of space bought piece by piece rather than allocated in one grant.
• Every block lists the same three contacts: the company's operations centre, the company, and an abuse role.
• The AS handle is a different brand again, two words run together with the letters for an autonomous system.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• A pile of same-sized blocks with dates weeks apart is what buying address space looks like after the free supply ran out. Each one was somebody else's allocation, transferred and renamed to match the buyer's convention.
• Three brands in one record, none of which matches the others, is the cost of that market. The netname records the convention, not the owner, and the owner changed after the convention was set.