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June 26, 2009
Poor choices in automatic / registration-based naming
One of my favorite memories from the past few years of scanning networks' PTRs is the day I ran into some spam from uncg.edu, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Seems the naming scheme for their dynamic networks was something along the lines of e.g.:
notceperryuncgedu.uncg.edu [152.13.115.41]
I saw a few more like this (munged to protect the poor folks), all with hostnames ending in uncgedu, and gave my usual sigh of resignation, but then I saw one that banished all doubt from my mind as to what was really going on:
notpantha91aolcom.uncg.edu [152.13.116.78]
Yes, that's right, they were using the end user's email address, stripping the dots and the @, and making that the hostname. Now, none of these example IPs resolves to anything, and I'm pretty confident they're no longer doing that. But it really freaked me out that anyone could be so lackadaisical with their end users' personal information, especially their email addresses.
Posted by schampeo at June 26, 2009 2:22 PM
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