The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved

[Eugene]

Earlier DU threads:
• "Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life"
• Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life

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Source: Associated Press

The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved

By FRANK BAJAK
April 24, 2021

-snip-

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.

The statement did not specify whether the “pilot project” would involve outside contractors.

The Pentagon periodically contends with unauthorized squatting on its space, in part because there has been a shortage of first-generation internet addresses since 2011; they now sell at auction for upwards of $25 each.

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.”

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-government-and-politics-b26ab809d1e9fdb53314f56299399949

[ratchiweenie]

1. This AP story has quite a bit more information than the Washington Post did. Very

suspicious.