We use a variation of this for several things. At the risk of getting in to political policy discussions ... We have a PERL script which looks for the wildcard .com record. If it finds it (the old Verisign SiteFinder), it injects a blackhole route to kill it. Also, we periodically pull in (every 4 hours), allocations from various registries like ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC, etc. and filter by country. It isn't elegant, but it does give us the ability to deny traffic to areas our policies dictate. Pretty effective for getting rid of spam and the offshore phishing sites. If you want to argue the political or policy side of doing this, I really don't have time, but our clients have been happy with it for two plus years. What I would to see (and have never researched in depth) is a way to apply the blackhole routes on a community to port basis (i.e. we set up a specific BGP community to filter mail, and that community goes to a route map that kills only port 25, another community applies to a map that kills port 80, etc). When I have spare time, I may see if there is any way to do that. Of course by then, IPv6 will be obsolete, so ..... Eric -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Abhishek Verma Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 2:52 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Blackhole Routes Hi, There are ways to add static routes that can be blackholed. I can understand the utility of such routes if those are installed in my forwarding table. What bewilders me is why would anyone want to advertise "blackhole" routes using say, BGP? Is it only to prevent some sort of DoS attacks or are there other uses also of advertising black hole routes? Thanks, Abhishek -- Class of 2004 Institute of Technology, BHU Varanasi, India