As Trump was leaving office, millions of dormant Pentagon IP addresses sprang to life
By CRAIG TIMBERG AND PAUL SONNE | The Washington Post | Published: April 24, 2021
WASHINGTON — While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company 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 U.S. military.
What happened next was stranger still.
The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That's almost 6% of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate – called IPv4 – where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market.
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/as-trump-was-leaving-office-millions-of-dormant-pentagon-ip-addresses-sprang-to-life-1.671009
