Pentagon - odd transfer of 175 million IP addresses to obscure company, Global Resources

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Pentagon explains odd transfer of 175 million IP addresses to obscure company Something weird happened minutes before Trump left—US says it was security research.

by Jon Brodkin -
Apr 26, 2021 3:00pm CST

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The US Department of Defense puzzled Internet experts by apparently transferring control of tens of millions of dormant IP addresses to an obscure Florida company just before President Donald Trump left the White House, but the Pentagon has finally offered a partial explanation for why it happened. The Defense Department says it still owns the addresses but that it is using a third-party company in a "pilot" project to conduct security research. "Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life" was the title of a Washington Post article on Saturday. Literally three minutes before Joe Biden became president, a company called Global Resource Systems LLC "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 US military," the Post said.

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Bigger than China Telecom and Comcast

Network experts were stumped by the emergence of Global Resource Systems for a while. Madory called it "a great mystery." At 11:57 am EST on January 20, three minutes before the Trump administration officially came to an end, "[a]n entity that hadn't been heard from in over a decade began announcing large swaths of formerly unused IPv4 address space belonging to the US Department of Defense," Madory wrote. Global Resource Systems is labeled AS8003 and GRS-DOD in BGP records. Madory wrote: By late January, AS8003 was announcing about 56 million IPv4 addresses, making it the sixth largest AS [autonomous system] in the IPv4 global routing table by originated address space. By mid-April, AS8003 dramatically increased the amount of formerly unused DoD address space that it announced to 175 million unique addresses.

Following the increase, AS8003 became, far and away, the largest AS in the history of the Internet as measured by originated IPv4 space. By comparison, AS8003 now announces 61 million more IP addresses than the now-second biggest AS in the world, China Telecom, and over 100 million more addresses than Comcast, the largest residential Internet provider in the US. In fact, as of April 20, 2021, AS8003 is announcing so much IPv4 space that 5.7 percent of the entire IPv4 global routing table is presently originated by AS8003. In other words, more than one out of every 20 IPv4 addresses is presently originated by an entity that didn't even appear in the routing table at the beginning of the year.

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Pentagon mystery with a Florida connection is solved.
Sort of. What is a shadowy company located atop a bank in Plantation, Florida doing for the Department of Defense?

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BOSTON — 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.

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The company did not return phone calls or emails from The Associated Press. It has no web presence, though it has the domain grscorp.com. Its name doesn’t appear on the directory of its Plantation, Florida, domicile, and a receptionist drew a blank when an AP reporter asked for a company representative at the office earlier this month. She found its name on a tenant list and suggested trying email. Records show the company has not obtained a business license in Plantation. Incorporated in Delaware and registered by a Beverly Hills lawyer, Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast.

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