In trying to diagnose a failover problem with my Cisco ASA 5520 firewalls, I ran a traceroute to www.btfl.com and, much to my surprise, some of the hops came back as RFC 1918 addresses.

Just to be clear, this host is not behind my firewall and there is no VPN involved. I have to connect across the open internet to get there.

How/why is this possible?

asa# traceroute www.btfl.com

Tracing the route to 157.56.176.94

 1  <redacted>
 2  <redacted>
 3  <redacted>
 4  <redacted>
 5  nap-edge-04.inet.qwest.net (67.14.29.170) 0 msec 10 msec 10 msec
 6  65.122.166.30 0 msec 0 msec 10 msec
 7  207.46.34.23 10 msec 0 msec 10 msec
 8   *  *  *
 9  207.46.37.235 30 msec 30 msec 50 msec
 10 10.22.112.221 30 msec
    10.22.112.219 30 msec
    10.22.112.223 30 msec
 11 10.175.9.193 30 msec 30 msec
    10.175.9.67 30 msec
 12 100.94.68.79 40 msec
    100.94.70.79 30 msec
    100.94.71.73 30 msec
 13 100.94.80.39 30 msec
    100.94.80.205 40 msec
    100.94.80.137 40 msec
 14 10.215.80.2 30 msec
    10.215.68.16 30 msec
    10.175.244.2 30 msec
 15  *  *  *
 16  *  *  *
 17  *  *  *

and it does the same thing from my FiOS connection at home:

C:\>tracert www.btfl.com

Tracing route to www.btfl.com [157.56.176.94]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  myrouter.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     8 ms     7 ms     8 ms  <redacted>
  3    10 ms    13 ms    11 ms  <redacted>
  4    12 ms    10 ms    10 ms  ae2-0.TPA01-BB-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81.199.82]
  5    16 ms    16 ms    15 ms  0.ae4.XL2.MIA19.ALTER.NET [152.63.8.117]
  6    14 ms    16 ms    16 ms  0.xe-11-0-0.GW1.MIA19.ALTER.NET [152.63.85.94]
  7    19 ms    16 ms    16 ms  microsoft-gw.customer.alter.net [63.65.188.170]
  8    27 ms    33 ms     *     ge-5-3-0-0.ash-64cb-1a.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.46.177]
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10    44 ms    43 ms    43 ms  207.46.37.235
 11    42 ms    41 ms    40 ms  10.22.112.225
 12    42 ms    43 ms    43 ms  10.175.9.1
 13    42 ms    41 ms    42 ms  100.94.68.79
 14    40 ms    40 ms    41 ms  100.94.80.193
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.