Update: The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved

[Beastly Boy]

Sat, April 24, 2021, 4:15 PM

BOSTON (AP) — A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.

”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. It also hopes to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of efforts to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries, who are consistently infiltrating U.S. networks, sometimes operating from unused internet address blocks.

-snip

Madory said advertising the address space will make it easier to chase off squatters and allow the U.S. military to “collect a massive amount of background internet traffic for threat intelligence.”

Some cybersecurity experts have speculated that the Pentagon may be using the newly advertised space to create “honeypots,” machines set up with vulnerabilities to draw hackers. Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.

“This greatly increases the space they could monitor,” said Madory, who published a blog post on the matter Saturday.

More on the mysterious Florida company that now claims to be managing the aforementioned millions of IP addresses at the link:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/big-pentagon-internet-mystery-now-201521516.html

[LonePirate]

1. The use by the Pentagon concerns me much less than the new and mysterious company.

Obviously this was all set up during the former guy's administration which makes me think this is a money grab or a grift for someone not on the up and up.

[OAITW r.2.0]

4. Or something worse. A DDS attack on Democratic websites?

A 100MM IP addresses could do real damage to Biden's ability to get his message out.

[OAITW r.2.0]

2. This sounds really bogus. A non-existant company, activated on 1/20, suddenly owns 100s

of millions IP addresses? How? Why?

[live love laugh]

3. I agree--the timing makes it especially suspicious.nt