After decades of not using a huge chunk of the Internet, the Pentagon has given control of millions of computer addresses to a previously unknown company in an effort to identify possible cyber vulnerabilities and threats
The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website.
As listed in records, the company’s address in Plantation, Fla., outside Fort Lauderdale, is a shared workspace in an office building that doesn’t show Global Resource Systems on its lobby directory. A receptionist at the shared workspace said Friday that she could provide no information about the company and asked a reporter to leave. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/
11.11.18.0 – 11.11.18.255 is an IP address range owned by Global Resource Systems, LLC and located in United States –
Minutes before Trump departed office, a mysterious Florida company reportedly took over a slice of the Pentagon’s internet space:
Since then, the company has increased its control to about 175 million IP addresses, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
The Associated Press reported that it controlled more space than some of the world’s largest internet providers, including Comcast and AT&T.
On Twitter on Saturday, the AP posted: “What a Pentagon spokesman could not explain is why the Defense Department chose Global Resource Systems LLC, a company that seems not to have existed until September, to manage the address space.”
A Saturday blog post from Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a networking information provider, detailed the “great mystery.”
On Inauguration Day, at 11:57 a.m. in Washington, a message was posted on the internet’s global routing table by an “entity that hadn’t been heard from in over a decade,” Madory wrote.
He wrote that the timing was “moments after the swearing-in of Joe Biden as the President of the United States and minutes before the statutory end of the administration of Donald Trump at noon Eastern time.”
news.yahoo.com/minutes-trump-departed-office-mysterious-120228613.html
h/t Anon Braveheart