A Florida company mysteriously won control over approximately 175 million IP addresses from the U.S. Department of Defense as part of a security pilot program in the last days of the Trump administration.
Global Resource Systems, the company that obtained the IP addresses, is a previously unknown company that the Associated Press described as "shadowy" in a Saturday report.
The IP address range, registered as GRS-DoD, AS8003, went live on Jan. 20 in the last minutes of the Trump administration, prompting some pundits to speculate that the timing was intentional.
The IP addresses were discovered to be being active at the time, and there are plenty of them, roughly 6% of all IPv4 addresses on the internet. The fact that the Defense Department controls the IP addresses has long been established. It created the internet and has owned the IP addresses for decades. But for most of that period, the majority have remained inactive.
According to The Washington Post, the Defense Department (DoD) still owns the IP addresses.
The initiative is being overseen by the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service (DDS), which solves problems and conducts technological tests for the military. The group reports directly to the Defense Secretary.
The Pentagon said the company is being used in a pilot project to test the DoD's IP address space and ensure that there are no "potential vulnerabilities."
"DDS authorized a pilot effort advertising DoD Internet Protocol space using Border Gateway Protocol," DDS Director Brett Goldstein said in a statement. "This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space."
Activating dormant IP addresses, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network observation company Kentik, makes it easier for the department to scare off any would-be squatters.
What is even more intriguing is Madory's claim that it would also allow the DoD to "collect a massive amount of background internet traffic for threat intelligence."
Global Resource Systems was established in September and has no public website or federal contracts, The Post said.
