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Millions of the Pentagon's Dormant IP Addresses Have Mysteriously Sprung to Life

Sunday April 25, 2021. 03:34 AM , from Slashdot/Apple
'Just before the end of the Trump administration, an obscure Florida company began announcing routes to IP addresses owned by the Pentagon,' writes long-time Slashdot reader whoever57. The Washington Post calls it 'a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military.'

What happened next was stranger still. The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That's almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market... 'They are now announcing more address space than anything ever in the history of the Internet,' said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company, who was among those trying to figure out what was happening...

The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a 'SWAT team of nerds' tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military... Brett Goldstein, the DDS's director, said in a statement that his unit had authorized a 'pilot effort' publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon. 'This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,' Goldstein said. 'Additionally, this pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities....'

The specifics of what the effort is trying to achieve remain unclear... What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses...

Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon still owns all the IP address space and hadn't sold any of it to a private party.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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