Hijacked IP space.

Mon Nov 3 20:56:11 UTC 2003

All,

Sorry, to interrupt any off-topic rambles, but I had a client call 
last week who had just had some telephone abuse heaped on them, by 
somebody accusing them of spamming. It turns out our client had a 
netblock assigned to them back in the mid-90's. They used to put on 
networking trade shows, and used the space for making show networks. 
They haven't put on a networking trade show (with a public network) 
since about 1997.

Of course to complicate the matter, the sole contact listed in whois 
no longer works there.

I informed our client how to remove their name from the whois record 
and relinquish the netblock back to ARIN, which I hope they are doing 
now.

I also have (at the suggestion of some research through the nanog 
archives) submitted the netblock to the completewhois site.

[I have no interest in commenting on the current inane OT nanog 
thread about that subject, so don't even try me.]

Mr. Thomas' cymru.com service was offline when I tried to contact it 
last week (he replied via email about an outage... sorry to hear... 
coffee will get there eventually. Order put to the roaster today. - 
hang in there.)

Of course I have no hard data, other than my client's phone call 
about another phone call, so I can't query based on a timestamp to 
see where this was being announced from. It appears to vanished, and 
has remained so according to my casual glances here and there.

The netblock in question is:

204.89.0.0/21

So, my question is: Other than the above, and mentioning it here, is 
there anything else *I* can do to assist my client? Especially since 
I am not at all directly related to this netblock in any way. 
Additionally, it would not hurt to know if anyone here *does* know 
when or where the announcement came from.

The client in question are good folks, and I hate to see their 
reputation tainted by the actions of others.

Thanks,

--chuck goolsbee, digital.forest