An explosive investigative report by the AP poses a ton of questions but offers very few tangible answers. Now, speculation is rampant.
While much of the nation was focused on the White House as Joe Biden was inaugurated as President on January 20th, across town at the Pentagon, 4% of the entire internet was being transferred to a mysterious private company in Florida. Other than a handful of journalists at the Associated Press who started looking into it recently, the vast majority of the nation was completely unaware. That would be like the United States selling off a chunk of land bigger than the state of Montana and nobody noticed.
Now, security experts and conspiracy theorists are wondering what the Pentagon is doing with this huge swath of IP space. The value of the 175 million IP addresses exceeds $4 billion. And to add even more intrigue, the company it was transferred to has past connections to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
”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.
The Associated Press was able to uncover the top layer but were barely able to dig any deeper. The Pentagon acknowledged the transfer and said in a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, it was being used to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space.” 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.
it’s long…click on the link above