DNS (Domain Name System) names contain a wide variety of information, such as geographic location, speed of the interface, type of interface, etc. However, extracting this information is challenging since this information does not have a consistent format across different ISPs (internet service providers) or even a particular ISP.

We present a new tool, GINIE, which extracts useful information and some common dictionary words from a DNS name. We use three ISPs and a CAIDA (Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis) dataset to demonstrate these capabilities.

Information extracted with GINIE provides valuable insight about the infrastructure of the three ISPs and shows the availability and type of information in a collection of DNS names from many ISPs that exist in a typical dataset. The embedded information from DNS names can be used (with some additional active measurements) to infer the geo-aware topology of an ISP.