Autonomous system
AS9983 ABS-AS-AP Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Unclassified APNIC
Summary
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
legacy government enterprise
AS9983 (ABS-AS-AP) is held by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia's national statistical agency, which sits in the Treasury portfolio and is responsible for the national Census and the country's official economic and social statistics. The AS carries the agency's own network. Its address space, 144.53.0.0/16, is registered to ABS in APNIC as a portable allocation.
What it's used for
RIS sees 4 announced IPv4 prefixes covering 65,536 addresses and only 1 observed BGP neighbour, with no IPv6. The four prefixes are really one: the 144.53.0.0/16 aggregate, plus three /24s from inside it (144.53.243.0/24, 144.53.244.0/24, 144.53.254.0/24) announced separately, which is the standard way of steering specific services onto a particular path or provider while keeping the covering aggregate in place.
A full /16 with a single BGP neighbour is a very government-agency shape: a large legacy allocation from an era when a national agency could take a class B, single-homed today because the connectivity is bought from a provider (or a whole-of-government network) rather than peered. The address count says nothing about how many machines are live — most of a /16 like this is unused or used internally.
Notable
- ABS is the agency behind the Australian Census; its public-facing capacity has been under public scrutiny before, notably around online Census delivery.
- The lack of any announced IPv6 is notable for a Commonwealth agency, given long-standing federal IPv6 policy ambitions.
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.
Transit providers
1 upstream, 0 downstream and 1 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
| AS | Network | Paths seen |
|---|---|---|
| AS7474 | SingTel Optus Pty Ltd | 236 |
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-18, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 9 prefixes · 65.54K addresses IPv6 0 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| AU | Australia | 9 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- APNIC
- Handle
AS9983- Registry name
- ABS-AS-AP
- Registrant
- Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Abuse contact
- domain.management@abs.gov.au
- Registered
- 2025-10-02
- Last changed
- 2026-03-11
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 4 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 6 authorising AS9983
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 4 of 4 announcements
- Route objects
- 7 naming AS9983
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
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 1,784 prefixes, as published 2026-10-19. 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