Some Iranian Physicist wants to sign my Guestbook?

Hmmm… I used to have one of those nifty little guestbooks for people to sign.  Sadly, the only people who ever wanted to sign it always seemed to be selling something.  Oddly enough, they also almost always seemed to be from places like Malaysia, Korea, China, Russia or somewhere in the Middle East.  You know… countries of real virtue and honor.  Yeah, right.

Suffice it to say, that I check my server logs regularly and habitually ban IP ranges from those countries whenever they appear to be trying to access things they have no business trying to access.  Tonight, however, I get a new one… Iran.  Why would anybody in Iran want to sign and/or spam my guestbook?  (My guess is the latter, of course.)

First off, I didn’t just look at the IP address and think to myself, “Oh, that’s Iran.”  I use a Network Lookup tool to fish that sort of stuff out.  So, anyway, here is the IP:  217.174.16.30

Wow, now that’s interesting…

inetnum:  217.174.16.0 - 217.174.20.255
netname:  NIOC-NET
descr:  National Iranian Oil Company
country:  IR
admin-c:  AA1143-RIPE
tech-c:  AHG2-RIPE
tech-c:  AHR
status:  ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by:  NIOC-MNT
source:  RIPE # Filtered

National Iranian Oil Company?  Far out.  If you check the IP using Network Tools, you’ll notice there are some interesting contact persons associated with it. 

person:  Amir Hassan Rasti
address:  Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics
address:  and Mathematics (IPM)

Theoretical Physics? Now, what on earth are these knuckleheads up to? Selling Viagra? 

Hey, Ali, Amir G. and Amir R., consider yourselves BANNED!