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I often wonder about the results of people using functional hostnames in their examples. Most PoC exploit code use "target.com" as a place holder which makes sense, but hilariously is also the hostname for US retailer Target...

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This is exactly the reason example.com exists

The same goes for TEST-NET (192.0.2.0/24), TEST-NET-2 (198.51.100.0/24), TEST-NET-3 (203.0.113.0/24), MCAST-TEST-NET (233.252.0.0/24), and the IPv6 documentation-only prefix (2001:db8::/32).

Yep. RFC2606 It is what they should use. And if you need to specify 2 hosts, you can use example.net and .org as well.

Unfortunately, the example domains don't convey context very well, so we see things like target.com, victim.com, etc

This can be corrected by target.example.com and victim.example.com. Conveys the context while remaining safe as an example.

That generally works, although in some cases it makes a difference whether two hosts are on the same tld; at the very least, it implies a connection between the two that may not always make sense (why is aggressor.example.com attacking victim.example.com?).

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