"Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life"
WaPo: After decades of not using a huge chunk of the Internet, the Pentagon has given control of millions of computer addresses to a previously unknown company in an effort to identify possible cyber vulnerabilities and threatshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/
Very intriguing event that raised a bunch of questions, but the short form is apparently in that headline. The Pentagon owns billions of dollars worth of unused IP addresses, and an internal agency released them through an unknown company (trumpishly, little more than a mail drop in an obscure building) to see and analyze them for whatever nefarious activity they drew and uncovered. At first it was thought someone (such as in the T admin) sold them, but that's now denied. Interestingly activated minutes before Biden was sworn in, I was relieved to learn it was not a "the last guy" theft/hostile action.
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 only announcement of Global Resources Systems’ management of Pentagon addresses happened in the obscure world of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — the messaging system that tells Internet companies how to route traffic across the world. There, messages began to arrive telling network administrators that IP addresses assigned to the Pentagon but long dormant could now accept traffic — but it should be routed to Global Resource Systems. ...
The theories were many. Did someone at the Defense Department sell off part of the military’s vast collection of sought-after IP addresses as Trump left office? Had the Pentagon finally acted on demands to unload the billions of dollars worth of IP address space the military has been sitting on, largely unused, for decades? An answer, of sorts, came Friday.
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.” Goldstein described the project as one of the Defense Department’s “many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential vulnerabilities are mitigated.” ...
What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses. Madory said his monitoring showed the broad movements of Internet traffic began immediately after the IP addresses were announced Jan. 20. ... The data may provide information about how malicious actors operate online and could reveal exploitable weaknesses in computer systems. In addition, several Chinese companies use network numbering systems that resemble the U.S. military’s IP addresses in their internal systems, Madory said. By announcing the address space through Global Resource Systems, that could cause some of that information to be routed to systems controlled by the U.S. military.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's a Pentagon cyber security group doing their job, just more visibly (to the cyber community) and spectacularly than usual.
Trumpists would call these part of the deep state that got in the way of their own nefarious scheming.
Interesting story. Of course my first instinctive reaction laid in the world of T / Putin infiltration at the very core of our national defense systems. for very corrupt and dangerous purposes.
It's very difficult for me to not be concerned about infiltration among the higher ranking officers eg. Mike Flynn, his brother, et. al) within our military, pentagon and intelligence agencies.
But since it seemed to sort of explode into action minutes before T left office, it sort of keeps my fears along that line of concern a bit at bay. So many things revealed from January 6th regarding paramilitary tactical and strategical elements,,, etc etc etc.
what amount to Putin's agents elected and appointed to the highest offices, and no doubt there are other infiltrators various places, but we've also seen honorable inside professionals fighting them (and bringing far more competence and commitment to what they do than the typical voter).
Technically, even though other nations have caught up in a lot of ways, and have victories here and there, in spite of the weaknesses of democracy frequently putting corrupt incompetents in power, we also know we still have some of the best capabilities on the planet.
So we should not be surprised to see indications of it now and then, even though their work mostly needs to be kept secret. In this case, techies everywhere started seeing and wondering what was happening immediately, journalists and security firms got on it, etc, so we get to learn about a technothriller event in real life.
Or New Jersey. Maybe that's where the nerd SWAT team got the idea. 
The WaPo's behind a firewall if you've used up your free-access articles this month, but others will undoubtedly be writing about this and we can all learn more about the various things they'd doing.
I envision a sort of register, taking the meta data from each "visit" and analyzing trends. I'm sure they have software that automates the launch of a sort of 'bare bones" web site.
But if that was their aim, you wouldn't think public knowledge of the program would be something they would want at all.
