Can network name have change automatically based on IP? (Win 10)

Question

Yesterday turned on one of my computers (running windows 10) and the network name was displayed as "UK Government Department for Work and Pensions" rather than my usual network name on my ethernet which is "network". Please see the images below:

http://i.imgur.com/TwJkzlC.png http://i.imgur.com/XFa0rwK.png

I deleted the registry entry associated with the connection to force a re-connection and it returned to its usual "network" as the name.

I've done a little googling as I'm intrigued and have realised that the ip my ISP has assigned most recently is within the following range:

51.0.0.0 - 51.255.255.255 

Which I believe used to be owned by the Department for Work and Pensions but have recently been partially sold off to free up IPV4 addresses?

To further test, I plugged another Windows 10 machine and a Windows 8 machine into the same ethernet connection, however both came up as "network" as indeed did the original machine once I forced a reconnect. All machines had the same external IP.

My question is, how & why would my pc change the network name to this? Why would it do it just on this machine and just that once?

Thus far all I can think of is that perhaps my ISP (who control the router in my rented place) have switched to a DNS that has not had the change propagated to it yet and somehow during the transition my pc picked it up?

Thanks for you help in advanced.

(Apologise for the wall of text and if I've made any formatting errors)

Thanks

Answer 1

IP addresses are assigned in blocks, and the allocation information about which organisation owns which block is encompassed by something called an autonomous system number, or ASN for short. As an example, 8.8.8.8 falls under AS15169, which has the following information listed:

ASNumber:       15169
ASName:         GOOGLE
ASHandle:       AS15169
RegDate:        2000-03-30
Updated:        2012-02-24    
Ref:            https://whois.arin.net/rest/asn/AS15169

OrgName:        Google Inc.
OrgId:          GOGL
Address:        1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City:           Mountain View
StateProv:      CA
PostalCode:     94043
Country:        US
RegDate:        2000-03-30
Updated:        2015-11-06
Ref:            https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/GOGL

OrgTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
OrgTechName:   Google Inc
OrgTechPhone:  [phone] 
OrgTechEmail:  [e-mail]
OrgTechRef:    https://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ZG39-ARIN

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE5250-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   Abuse
OrgAbusePhone:  [phone] 
OrgAbuseEmail:  [e-mail]
OrgAbuseRef:    https://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ABUSE5250-ARIN

RTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
RTechName:   Google Inc
RTechPhone:  [phone] 
RTechEmail:  [e-mail]
RTechRef:    https://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ZG39-ARIN

You can look up more information about AS15169 or any other ASN you like. Each block of IPs assigned to the ASN is known as a prefix, and other ASNs which route traffic to and from the ASN (usually orchestrated via BGP) are known as peers.

Now your case is an interesting one. The IP address range you provided in your question, at the moment, appears not to have been fully allocated (f.e. 51.0.0.1 has no ASN assigned). If we look at a chain of media releases starting here, and moving on to here, it appears that the 51.0.0.0/8 block was used by the UK government and DWP internally for a fair while, but now they've sold it off as a fund raising exercise.

My guess is that your ISP bought the ASN which previously belonged to the DWP, and your system looked up the ASN whois information and displayed it. It hadn't been properly updated, at least on the lookup server that Microsoft is using, so you got the DWP's info.

As for why it only happened once, I'm not sure. Perhaps your query to the server triggered Microsoft's lookup server to pull more up-to-date information from further up the chain.