Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life

[LessAspin]

Link to tweet

While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing 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.

The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website...

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...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/

[intrepidity]

1. Sounds like an important story

It will be decades before to full effects of the formerguy's subversion is known.

[Grasswire2]

2. Bizarro

We likely have no idea what kinds of covert ops Trump put into motion before he left.

Example: The USPS operation spying on social media habits of citizens.

And now this.

[Lovie777]

3. But the republicans are always screaming FREEDOM . . .

they don't want their freedom taking away and yet t-rump and his comrades have been doing just that.

[hlthe2b]

4. Seems alarming, but the reporters don't seem to have uncovered a nefarious purpose or outcome...

Knowing it happened coincident with Trump's departure does make me wonder, though.

[Captain Zero]

5. Follow the money, if they are worth billions

And they were released right before Trump left office, he will be getting kickbacks once they are monetized.

I don't believe for a minute this was a harmless matter because it's too coincidental to him leaving office.

[hlthe2b]

6. The article seems to contradict itself into whether or not these were actually sold?

[SWBTATTReg]

7. I find this hard to believe, being that .gov and .mil are solely for governmental and military use,

so this one company claiming these numbers is far fetched and won't stand. The IP registration process (who owns an IP address and the assignment of IP addresses has been controlled by several companies (keep track of ownership/etc. for assignment purposes, kind of like the npa nxx wire telephone numbers we see today (formerly Bell Core handled, I'm not sure who handles it now, Bell Core was spend off into a separate company, that I can't recall the number of). They probably also handled the establishment of extensions too in the IP address, i.g., gov, mil, com, etc.

[LessAspin]

8. Noel Casler

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet