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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.
Jon Brodkin - 4/26/2021, 5:00 PM
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.
The number of Pentagon-owned IP addresses announced by the company rose to 56 million by late January and 175 million by April, making it the world's largest announcer of IP addresses in the IPv4 global routing table.
"The theories were many," the Post article said. "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?"
The Post said it got an answer from the Defense Department on Friday in the form of a statement from the director of "an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service."