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Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

Anyone can use any word they want as a TLD on their local network. No need to register it on the public Internet.

Just set up a zone in your local DNS and you’re done.

In fact I could even use .bestbuy as a TLD on my own network. The fact that they registered it publicly doesn’t stop anyone from doing this.

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That's true but best practice is to own the public one too. I'm pretty sure Microsoft recommends owning the domains you use for Active Directory, and not using anything that isn't it can't be made public

Some companies uses bare hostnames for internal systems. Those same companies use HTTP Basic auth to log into those systems. And some routers have weird behaviour for DNS resolution, like prioritising .net as the default TLD.

I ran into a situation where, even on VPN, going to https://<company>vacation/ on my home network would take me to https://<company>vacation.net (a valid domain). It would have been trivial for the owner of that domain to phish for credentials.

I had an issue with an old Access Point whose DHCP server set up the local domain suffix as accespointbrand.com, with no way to change it from GUI nor config file.

Unfortunately the AP manufacturer didn’t renew the domain and it was squatted by an ad serving website.

Every hare domain became subdomain.accesspointbrand.com

So now and then I would get those ads when using wifi. I ended up changing the Access point.

I think they used to recommend using .local as the TLD for internal stuff. Not sure if that is a good idea or if you are shooting yourself in the foot these days with if you plan on using AAD.

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