4 ms·

[8] doesn't seem to be quite the smoking gun they are making out. I did some digging into other hosts near that one and it looks like pretty standard business I

by __alexs 13y ago

[8] doesn't seem to be quite the smoking gun they are making out. I did some digging into other hosts near that one and it looks like pretty standard business ISP stuff to me. Outlook Web Access, phone systems, a few company websites. (Although the companies themselves are interesting, military and pharmaceuticals from my brief survey of SSL certificates.) Not directly NSA. Doesn't seem implausible for it to have been running on a compromised host if there's publicly accessible PBXs and stuff around there.

mr_luc 13y ago
Can you please explain what [8] does show, then? [8] seems to show that the ENTIRE IP RANGE is assigned to nsa.gov. Just seeing that some innocuous-looking services are running on some IPs in that range doesn't mean anything for or against. The government uses Outlook, has phones ... and even owns businesses (sometimes surreptitiously, like CIA front companies). In fact, if the intelligence apparatus of this country didn't own or directly control at least one ISP, I'd be very, very surprised.
- A1kmm 13y ago
  What [8] shows is that nsa.gov resolves to 65.196.127.226. 65.196.127.226 is part of the range 65.192.0.0/11 assigned to AS (autonomous system) 701, which is "UUnet Technologies, Inc". From Wikipedia, "Today, UUNET is an internal brand of Verizon Business". Both 65.196.127.226 (the server that hosts nsa.gov) and 65.222.202.53 fall in the same /11 block (i.e. a block of 2,097,152 addresses) assigned to UUnet / Verizon Business. However, that is a huge block of IP addresses, and numerous other servers are also hosted by Verizon Business on that block - http://route.robtex.com/65.192.0.0-11.html http://route.robtex.com/65.192.0.0-11.html will give you a list. It is entirely possible that the Verizon Business is providing services to some US government agency to run 65.222.202.53, but the fact that NSA also uses Verizon Business to host its website is hardly conclusive proof of anything.

by __alexs 13y ago

mr_luc 13y ago

Can you please explain what [8] does show, then? [8] seems to show that the ENTIRE IP RANGE is assigned to nsa.gov. Just seeing that some innocuous-looking services are running on some IPs in that range doesn't mean anything for or against. The government uses Outlook, has phones ... and even owns businesses (sometimes surreptitiously, like CIA front companies). In fact, if the intelligence apparatus of this country didn't own or directly control at least one ISP, I'd be very, very surprised.

A1kmm 13y ago
What [8] shows is that nsa.gov resolves to 65.196.127.226. 65.196.127.226 is part of the range 65.192.0.0/11 assigned to AS (autonomous system) 701, which is "UUnet Technologies, Inc". From Wikipedia, "Today, UUNET is an internal brand of Verizon Business". Both 65.196.127.226 (the server that hosts nsa.gov) and 65.222.202.53 fall in the same /11 block (i.e. a block of 2,097,152 addresses) assigned to UUnet / Verizon Business. However, that is a huge block of IP addresses, and numerous other servers are also hosted by Verizon Business on that block - http://route.robtex.com/65.192.0.0-11.html http://route.robtex.com/65.192.0.0-11.html will give you a list. It is entirely possible that the Verizon Business is providing services to some US government agency to run 65.222.202.53, but the fact that NSA also uses Verizon Business to host its website is hardly conclusive proof of anything.