Pinging Mac “computername” hits strange IP address

dnsNetworkterminalwifi

I'm using a MacBook Pro with Mojave 10.14.6. I had entered a computername in System Preferences, Sharing of (not really) mymacbk. I am using Frontier's FiOS service, whose router normally attaches ".home" as the top level domain. For various reasons discussed elsewhere on the net (for example, 189350), a hyphen, digit combination is getting added to that, so I see mymacbk-3 using the hostname command from bash.

But, just for fun, I executed 

ping mymacbk
ping mymacbk.home

In both cases, I got back an IP address that, according to https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx reverse lookup tool, belongs to Akamai Tech: a23-202-231-168.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com Looking up both of my actual names (mymacbk and mymacbk.home) on their DNS Lookup returned nothing.

What is going on? More importantly, is this possibly a symptom of having been compromised or virus/malware infected?

Best Answer

Akamai runs a content distributions system used by major websites to provide fast web response on a global scale. It is used by Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and many others.

Port 443 is used for HTTPS - the encrypted version of HTTP web-page access.

It is quite normal to see a lot of traffic directed through Akamai.

iCloud content is stored on Akamai servers. Assuming you are using iCloud, e.g. to store Safari bookmarks, it is normal that opening Safari triggers a connection to Akamai since the actual content (= Safari bookmarks) is physically stored on Akamai distribution servers and needs to be synced when opening the browser.

More insight on it:

On July 21, 1999, at Macworld Expo New York, Apple and Akamai announced a strategic partnership to build Apple's new media network, QuickTime TV (QTV), based on QuickTime Streaming Server.[32] Both companies later announced that Apple had made a $12.5 million investment in the company the previous month.[33] Apple continues to use Akamai as their primary content delivery network[34] for a wide range of applications including software downloads from Apple's Website, QuickTime movie trailers, and the iTunes Store.[35]

So to your question "is this possibly a symptom of having been compromised or virus/malware infected?" - I don't think it is compromised or infected by virus.

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