koldfront

How to break into the AkaRank top 1000 #net

🕢︎ - 2026-03-03 - 🟊 2 - ♺ 1
Screenshot of the Reddit entry about asjo.org on r/dns

This morning at work a colleague told me that while reading r/dns on Reddit he had noticed a blog post there about a domain of mine: "Hey, I know that domain!?"

A while back in 2024 I had annoying problems with the DNS of one of my personal domains, asjo.org.

Check this out:

  $ rg '^(asjo.org|x.com|telegram.org|ebay.com|intel.com|huawei.com|mozilla.net|hotmail.com|discord.com|lenovo.com|uber.com|dropbox.com|tencent.com|amazon.co.uk|python.org|booking.com|amazon.de|duckduckgo.com|slack.com|nvidia.com|oracle.com)[.]' top1K.csv
  asjo.org.,652,2026-03-02
  x.com.,671,2026-03-02
  telegram.org.,689,2026-03-02
  ebay.com.,719,2026-03-02
  intel.com.,727,2026-03-02
  huawei.com.,742,2026-03-02
  mozilla.net.,745,2026-03-02
  hotmail.com.,760,2026-03-02
  discord.com.,778,2026-03-02
  lenovo.com.,826,2026-03-02
  uber.com.,836,2026-03-02
  dropbox.com.,838,2026-03-02
  tencent.com.,843,2026-03-02
  amazon.co.uk.,893,2026-03-02
  python.org.,906,2026-03-02
  booking.com.,928,2026-03-02
  amazon.de.,948,2026-03-02
  duckduckgo.com.,962,2026-03-02
  slack.com.,966,2026-03-02
  nvidia.com.,968,2026-03-02
  oracle.com.,973,2026-03-02
  $

Akamai keeps a ranking of domains based on DNS data, and my domain - asjo.org - is in the top 1000, and not only that, it's above some sites that are pretty big, as you can see!

No wonder my poor home ADSL router couldn't handle the traffic and I had to defer to professionals, even after running DNS for my domains since 2016.

The Reddit post was this one: The Mystery of ASJO.ORG - 46 million DNS ANY queries for a Danish man's personal domain, from DoD address space, residential ISPs, and cloud providers across 12 countries. A two-year mystery nobody can explain - which links to a blog post by acidvegas, who contacted me a couple of days ago over email, wondering what was going on, as asjo.org queries were looking suspicious in a DNS honeypot.

I hope that somebody uncovers the cause some day - it would be fun to know.

With a domain more popular than x.com, intel.com, hotmail.com, python.org, and nvidia.com, I guess there is a pot of gold at the end of some rainbow near me now?!?

🕢︎ - 2026-03-03 - 2 comments - 🟊 2 - ♺ 1

Just read the acidvegas blog post. I thought it was interesting in his latest update that one of the network operators of the ASNs saw the post, recognized his ASN number and started doing some digging to discover that the DNS queries were not actually coming from his network. That makes it stranger to me. Why is someone spoofing IPs from all over the world to query your domain? What did you do? What do you know??

- jesse 🕠︎ - 2026-03-10

+=

Yes, that is interesting - perhaps not surprising, since some of the requests originated from old US Department of Defence IP-addresses.

I'm sure I have pissed somebody off once in a while, but this response seems a little out of the ordinary.

- Adam Sjøgren 🕖︎ - 2026-03-10

+=

Add comment

How to comment, in excruciating detail…

To avoid spam many websites make you fill out a CAPTCHA, or log in via an account at a corporation such as Facebook, Google or even Microsoft GitHub.

I have chosen to use a more old school method of spam prevention.

To post a comment here, you need to:

  • Configure a newsreader¹ to connect to the server koldfront.dk on port 1119 using nntps (nntp over TLS).
  • Open the newsgroup called lantern.koldfront and post a follow up to the article.
¹ Such as Thunderbird, Pan, slrn, tin or Gnus (part of Emacs).

Or, you can fill in this form:

+=