[HN Gopher] Millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses spra...
___________________________________________________________________
 
Millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life on
January 20
 
Author : jimschley
Score  : 328 points
Date   : 2021-04-24 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
 
web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
 
| throwaway2474 wrote:
| Can someone explain how we know these "announcements" are real?
| What's to stop me setting up a company and announcing random
| dormant address ranges that I don't own?
 
| ThothIV wrote:
| Also adding 255.0/8 and 255/4 which is essentially just... IPV6.
| So we're finally going ipv6, I guess!
 
| yftsui wrote:
| Previous story in 2015:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006534 . This article is
| exaggerating by saying it happened overnight, which started
| actually 5 years ago.
 
  | frombody wrote:
  | Global Resource Systems LLC was only created in September of
  | last year.
  | 
  | It is very much worth asking who this legal entity is and why a
  | private company is better suited to these efforts than the
  | government.
 
    | yftsui wrote:
    | I read the article but I believe the key point is since when
    | 11.x.x.x stopped being dormant addresses, instead of these
    | IPs just transferred ownership but not "dormant".
    | 
    | As an interesting fact, when searching "aliyun 11.0.0.0"
    | which is the mentioned Chinese cloud provider I believe, they
    | apparently has been using that as internal IPs since 2015 as
    | well
 
    | jessriedel wrote:
    | In practice the US government is constrained from paying
    | market rates for tech talent. It can either hire companies to
    | complete the entire project, or it can hire a consulting
    | service (which skims off a massive overhead) to provide
    | technical talent inside a government agency.
 
  | [deleted]
 
| jvdvegt wrote:
| Paywall-free link: https://archive.is/tKOOA
 
  | codeproject wrote:
  | Thanks a lot, Appreciate. It is not I don't want to pay the
  | washingtonpost.com. I just don't have time to read them.
 
    | GekkePrutser wrote:
    | https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome also
    | really works well on the desktop. Unfortunately I haven't
    | found a way to get it working on Firefox on mobile (the
    | chrome repo also contains the FF one now ;) ). Thanks for the
    | archive link.
    | 
    | PS I understand that websites need to monetise.. But getting
    | a subscription to read one linked article per month or so is
    | just not going to happen. The sites I use a lot I do pay a
    | membership for.
 
      | fwn wrote:
      | You need Firefox 68 ( fennec 68.11.0 ) to use extensions
      | from the open internet. Mozilla axed general extension
      | support in later versions of their android browser.
      | 
      | I just keep it around next to my regular browser for the
      | occasional paywall.
 
        | GekkePrutser wrote:
        | Thanks, I'm not sure if I want to run a browser that old
        | though... Security-wise. Even if it's probably ok now,
        | it's never going to get updated.
        | 
        | I wish they just supported sideloading of extensions. I
        | wonder how developers are supposed to test their stuff on
        | mobile.
 
      | bagacrap wrote:
      | perhaps you should consider getting a subscription one
      | month per year and using the extension the other 11 if you
      | think that's a more fair price to pay
 
        | GekkePrutser wrote:
        | Good point. But I'm not sure if I'd do this with the
        | Washington post. I wouldn't normally read this unless
        | it's linked from somewhere else (I live in Europe).
        | 
        | I actually had an online subscription to the Guardian for
        | a while because they were really good on the privacy
        | advocacy news. I wanted to support a paper with deep
        | dives into privacy issues. However the last couple of
        | years I got annoyed with too much Brexit stuff (not
        | surprising for a UK based paper obviously but as I don't
        | live in the UK I don't want to read about it every day).
        | So I let it lapse.
        | 
        | But there's another thing holding me back. If I subscribe
        | I have to give all my personal details. I don't want to
        | have too many sites where I have that around, data leaks
        | are now happening too often. Even a couple days ago I got
        | yet another notification from haveibeenpwned (this time
        | it was the Spanish company phonehouse.es that was hit).
        | 
        | Anyway, I just wanted to say that while I use paywall
        | avoiding tools I'm not blind to the problem of
        | monetisation and the cost of real journalism :)
 
    | uptown wrote:
    | They'll actually take your money whether you read it or not.
 
    | joezydeco wrote:
    | If you have Amazon prime, it's half price and free for the
    | first month.
 
    | pelagic_sky wrote:
    | Thank you! Had to use Safari on mobile as the captcha did not
    | play well with Firefox.
 
      | gitowiec wrote:
      | Google recaptcha? I get the same problem continuously on FX
      | desktop and Android :(
 
        | GekkePrutser wrote:
        | Really? I use Firefox literally all the time (with the
        | minor exception of some internal work sites where they
        | require Edge) and while all captchas annoy me to no end,
        | recaptcha does work perfectly fine on Firefox even with
        | uBlock origin and pihole running. Both on Desktop (I use
        | FF on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD :) ) and on
        | Android.
        | 
        | What is the problem you're seeing?
        | 
        | In fact I really rarely have any issues with FF
        | whatsoever, and if I do it is always either uBlock Origin
        | blocking a little bit too much, or a site that
        | specifically rules out Firefox (like
        | https://business.apple.com ), probably for no real reason
        | other than not bothering to test their site with it.
 
    | rch wrote:
    | I've tried subscribing to a few news sources, including WaPo,
    | but I can't handle the political agendas (right, left, or any
    | of it).
    | 
    | I've had better luck with subscription based aggregators, but
    | nothing exciting enough to want to plug one in particular.
    | 
    | Always looking for new options to try.
 
      | dogman144 wrote:
      | Yeah all the news sources my parents sub'd to in the early
      | 00s and I sort of figured I'd sub to as well once ready are
      | aggravatingly narrative driven. I'm not sure if I never
      | noticed that, or if it's a new media approach, but I don't
      | need "baseball + narrative injection" articles in my life.
      | I'm actually fairly bummed out about this, I go to Reuters
      | now.
 
        | anigbrowl wrote:
        | News coverage has always been narrative driven to some
        | extent, but previously that was more in selectivity of
        | coverage. The quality of reporting has been in a long
        | slow decline due to a mix of sagging finances and low-no
        | quality control competition. The 'Action News' TV format
        | significantly degraded things, and then blogs and
        | specifically conservative-targeted media drove adoption
        | of the narrative approach.
        | 
        | This revealing interview gives an interesting perspective
        | on the media business around the turn of the century.
        | Note that this is a pdf archive copy saved to draw
        | attention to a particular segment, and I'd urge you
        | ignore that and rad the whole thing. I can't link to the
        | original as it vanished some time ago, and this archive
        | predates the establishment of the internet archive. Thus
        | the presentation is biased (sorry) but it's the only
        | complete copy of the interview I know of. https://zfacts.
        | com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_M...
 
      | deanCommie wrote:
      | I think the key question isn't which political agenda they
      | have, but whether they report facts or opinions.
      | 
      | In that regard, WaPo is pretty good but you can still do
      | better: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
 
        | axaxs wrote:
        | It's not nearly that simple. You can essentially print an
        | opinion based only in fact, both by picking carefully
        | which stories you cover, and also which details of which
        | story you choose to report. It's completely possible to
        | frame the exact same story as either left wing or right
        | wing using only facts.
        | 
        | If you want recent proof, look at that debacle with that
        | Toledo kid. Some reported police shoot an armed thug,
        | some report police shoot an unarmed kid. The video proof
        | shows neither side is telling the whole truth.
 
        | ufmace wrote:
        | That isn't really how it works anymore. It's possible
        | (and standard) to push any political agenda without ever
        | stating an opinion directly. It's all about which
        | specific facts you choose to report and which you choose
        | to ignore. It's very easy to select and report only facts
        | that make group A look good, or only facts that make them
        | look bad. In that way, 2 news sources can give people the
        | opposite opinion without anyone ever stating an opinion
        | or saying something that isn't true.
 
        | frogpelt wrote:
        | And furthermore, public sentiment (and therefore
        | elections) are decided by what the main sources of media
        | determine is the most important news.
        | 
        | Example: Cops have shot a thousand people a year for
        | several years in a row (maybe a decade). About 300 of
        | those each year have been black, which is a
        | disproportionate amount by some measures.
        | 
        | However, it is nowhere near the biggest problem in our
        | country even for black people. But because the media has
        | chosen to report on that problem near constantly since
        | Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public
        | consciousness and therefore influences thousands of
        | people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to
        | develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more
        | division in our country.
        | 
        | Most of what they report is factual but is it as
        | important as the lofty position they are giving it in the
        | news? Is it helping?
 
        | shigawire wrote:
        | Yes - cops should kill fewer people.
 
      | crooked-v wrote:
      | Every news source of any kind has some sort of bias. The
      | only way to escape that completely is to live alone in the
      | woods as a hermit.
 
    | dkdk8283 wrote:
    | It's the principle for me. I won't support any publication
    | with obvious bias.
 
      | crooked-v wrote:
      | Everyone has bias of one kind or another.
 
      | atat7024 wrote:
      | Do you pay for the Financial Times/WSJ?
 
      | mitchdoogle wrote:
      | All news outlets are biased. Choosing what to report is
      | part of bias. Nobody has the resources to report on every
      | possible news story. There is even such a thing as
      | "centrist bias". Better to choose a few reputable
      | publications with different bias (according to FAIR or
      | whoever) if you want a more balanced approach.
 
| williesleg wrote:
| Aah, the wapo, that's Bezos, isn't it?
 
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "large amounts of data could provide several benefits for those
| in a position to collect and analyze it for threat intelligence
| and other purposes"
 
  | smoldesu wrote:
  | Another great example of computer literacy in the world of
  | journalism.
 
| LogicX wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924988
 
| echelon wrote:
| I want to reply to the following dead comment [1]
| 
| > Aah, the wapo, that's Bezos, isn't it?
| 
| It actually doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that a company
| as large as Amazon sees vast, unused resources held by the
| government. They publish an article as a sort of "wink wink,
| nudge nudge" to see if they can get it put up for auction.
| 
| In fact, I'd be shocked if someone at Amazon or another company
| hasn't tried to ask the Pentagon about this.
| 
| > Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department,
| confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon
| still owns all the IP address space and hadn't sold any of it to
| a private party.
| 
| I bet they'd find a buyer if they wanted to sell.
| 
| edit: Downvotes? Really? I'm just trying to start a conversation
| on something I find interesting.
| 
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925616
 
  | judge2020 wrote:
  | I think the downvotes come from entertaining the idea that,
  | because WAPO writes about something, that it's ultimately in
  | order to further the interests of AWS/Amazon/Bezos. This is not
  | really supported by evidence, so any "conversation" regarding
  | this is pretty much useless and helps nobody.
 
  | 1MachineElf wrote:
  | Had Amazon won JEDI, a significant chunk of those IPs would
  | exist on their infrastructure.
 
    | bushn1989 wrote:
    | JEDI was a deal for internal cloud infrastructure. I don't
    | think they would be utilizing public IP address ranges.
 
  | pelagic_sky wrote:
  | I don't know why you're being down voted. It's an interesting
  | idea.
 
    | hobs wrote:
    | I didnt downvote, but random speculation with no evidence
    | doesn't get upvotes on hacker news; a discussion of things
    | you find interesting that others find baseless with get you
    | downvotes immediately.
 
      | blux wrote:
      | Well, the article sort of requires discussion on what might
      | be happening here, not?
 
    | cmeacham98 wrote:
    | "edit: Downvotes? Really?" is a surefire method of attracting
    | downvotes.
 
      | echelon wrote:
      | I got -4 in downvotes. (-2 before my edit.) I don't know
      | what's going on.
      | 
      | I understand when I call out Apple or Google for bad
      | behavior that I can attract downvotes. Sometimes my posts
      | are snarky, and I understand in that case too.
      | 
      | But I can point to instances where posts I made days ago
      | were all downvoted in unison. Or completely informational
      | threads where every single one of my comments gets a
      | downvote or two.
      | 
      | Just a few days ago I got downvoted the second after I
      | posted a comment. I spotted a typo immediately after
      | submitting, clicked edit, and found myself downvoted before
      | anyone could have possibly even read my comment (it was
      | long). Maybe it was a mis-click -- who knows? But it was
      | great feedback after having just submitted. And in concert
      | with all the other recent downvotes, it's frustrating...
      | 
      | I've been sitting at the same "karma" value for months, and
      | I don't think I'm being a bad member of the community.
      | 
      | It's more than likely noise, but it's got me rattled. It's
      | not actionable feedback. With the pandemic and lack of
      | social contact with other engineers, and this sort of
      | judgement, I don't like it. I honestly don't think I'm
      | being a nuisance.
      | 
      | (And here this comment is with downvotes and no comments.
      | Sigh.)
 
        | ufmace wrote:
        | I upvoted, if nothing else it's a perfectly reasonable
        | comment with an interesting hypothesis.
        | 
        | HN karma is a little weird. IMO, if you've never been
        | downvoted to -4, then you've never said anything really
        | interesting. It's easy to just tell the crowd what they
        | want to hear, saying true and important things doesn't
        | always go down so well. Don't sweat it too hard.
        | Sometimes posts do acquire downvotes at suspicious times
        | and rates. Makes me wonder if some external orgs managed
        | to build downvote bots for HN or are directing voting
        | somehow.
 
        | WalterGR wrote:
        | You already got feedback in hobs's comment. They wrote:
        | 
        | "I didnt downvote, but random speculation with no
        | evidence doesn't get upvotes on hacker news; a discussion
        | of things you find interesting that others find baseless
        | with get you downvotes immediately."
 
        | ratsmack wrote:
        | Speculation is part of the conversation.
 
  | regextegrity wrote:
  | Don't criticise lord bezos
 
  | [deleted]
 
| dang wrote:
| Related: https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-mystery-of-as8003/
| 
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924988, but no
| comments there to speak of)
 
| pgn674 wrote:
| "several Chinese companies use network numbering systems that
| resemble the U.S. military's IP addresses in their internal
| systems"
| 
| I don't think I've heard of this before. What does it mean? Does
| China operate a disconnected BGP network? Or do they have some
| modified protocol, or what?
 
  | fred256 wrote:
  | Not just Chinese companies. I know of one FAANG company that
  | used internal IP addresses in the 11.0.0.0/8 space (in addition
  | to, not instead of, RFC 1918 space).
 
    | walrus01 wrote:
    | Every time I've seen this it's because of inefficient and
    | wasteful use of 10/8 internally. Like, not every tiny site or
    | thing needs a /24. Once the wasteful use becomes entrenched
    | as a practice, it would be very labor intensive and time-
    | consuming to go on a renumbering plan. As compared to the
    | effort to just use 11/8.
    | 
    | And then ultimately because of refusal to get over the
    | technical hurdle of using IPv6 for internal management.
 
      | knorker wrote:
      | But have you seen inside of FAANG?
 
    | snowwrestler wrote:
    | Well I would hope it's not Apple since they already own all
    | of 17.0.0.0... one of only 7 private companies that own their
    | own /8, as far as I know.
 
  | nanliu wrote:
  | Alibaba for example use DoD address ranges for their management
  | servers running Alicloud services. They assumed since nothing
  | in their cloud platform would connect to those addresses they
  | can use these them to alleviate IPv4 shortage. In Alicloud, the
  | customer have the right to use any RFC1918 addresses, so they
  | had to be creative since they didn't have sufficient IPv4
  | addresses.
 
    | sterlind wrote:
    | but if they're not filtering BGP announcements for those
    | ranges (however unlikely), and the GFW isn't blocking traffic
    | out to those addresses (even more unlikely), and the internal
    | metrics were high (super unlikely), I guess it'd slurp out
    | all the traffic? maybe this was a weird smash-and-grab.
 
  | walrus01 wrote:
  | Lots of less clueful network operators worldwide have used the
  | DoD /8 IP blocks internally, under the impression that they'll
  | never show up in the global v4 routing table, essentially for
  | the same purposes that people would use the 10/8 RFC1918
  | blocks.
 
    | jeroenhd wrote:
    | Some of those less-cluefull operators include Juniper and
    | Azure[1], Cisco[2][3], and probably many other companies.
    | When Cloudflare put its 1.1.1.1 DNS server into use, it
    | started receiving huge amounts of packets destined to
    | unroutable addresses because the 1.0.0.0/8 space was
    | (mostly?) unused.
    | 
    | If you configure your routers correctly, none of these IP
    | addresses should resolve, anyway. If something in your
    | network is intentionally dialing the department of defence,
    | you probably have some kind of problem at hand. In theory
    | this might become a huge problem, but in practice it probably
    | won't.
    | 
    | [1]: https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/vmx/informat
    | ion-...
    | 
    | [2]: https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/us/docs/2017
    | /pdf...
    | 
    | [3]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/157682/why-
    | does...
 
      | LinuxBender wrote:
      | I know of a couple companies that used 1.0.0.0/8 as their
      | internal VPN/WAN network. Myself and others explained why
      | this could be problematic but we were ignored. It's
      | actually _mostly_ fine as long as you 1) never need to
      | reach that network and 2) block traffic in that network
      | from leaving your edge network and 3) triple-check that you
      | have blocked that network from ever being announced from
      | your routers. Downside being you have to double or triple
      | NAT to reach anything in that network. Hamachi uses _or
      | used_ 25 /8 _ministry of defense_ as their VPN network.
 
        | ev1 wrote:
        | T-Mobile used or uses UK MoD space also for NAT.
 
      | walrus01 wrote:
      | Juniper and Cisco are equipment vendors, not ISPs. If the
      | DOD /8s are used in some documentation examples, that's a
      | whole other thing.
      | 
      | If network operators are taking the theoretical network
      | blocks provided in training examples and attempting to copy
      | and paste them into real world use, that is a whole other
      | problem with training and education. And lack of oversight
      | by senior people who should know better at their company.
      | 
      | 1/8 is also a whole other thing because it's a legitimately
      | announced block controlled by, as I recall, APNIC. If it's
      | in some peoples' 20 year old bogon folded that's their
      | problem, not apnic's.
 
      | ethbr0 wrote:
      | What IPs does the DoD actually host defense-related
      | services on?
      | 
      | E.g. https://www.defense.gov/Resources/Military-
      | Departments/A-Z-L...
 
        | walrus01 wrote:
        | NIPR and SIPR don't talk to the global routing tables for
        | v4 and v6. Generally if a DOD person needs to access
        | commercial internet resources for things, it'll be
        | through a separate commercial network purpose LAN, or
        | through something like an rdp session to a Citrix thin
        | client to do that.
 
        | chipsa wrote:
        | I think you'd be surprised. Most NIPR computers just use
        | a regular proxy server for internet access. But example:
        | 214 /8 is a DoD owned block, and "weather.af.mil" is on
        | that block, and both externally and internally reachable.
 
        | walrus01 wrote:
        | Not that NIPR computers don't have access to the internet
        | - but because this isn't 1987, those individual
        | workstations would never have public facing DoD v4 IPs.
        | They'll always be behind some combination of NAT and
        | firewall or as you mentioned, proxy. Certainly there
        | could be some DoD public IP on the external interfaces of
        | said firewalls. If I had to guess very often the public
        | facing side of those boxes might be a commercially
        | acquired local ISP using that ISP's IP space, and not
        | actual DoD IP space...
 
  | photon-torpedo wrote:
  | If I remember correctly, one of the large Chinese
  | supercomputers (ex #1 in the TOP500) uses the 11.0.0.0 address
  | space for its internal network.
 
  | woah wrote:
  | These IP addresses were unused for a very long time, so using
  | them on internal networks worked fine. Once the Floridian
  | company in the article started announcing them, gateway routers
  | on the Chinese internal networks may have started sending their
  | traffic to Florida.
 
    | pgn674 wrote:
    | Ohh, I think I see. So instead of (or in addition to)
    | creating internal subnets inside 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12,
    | and 192.168.0.0/16, they set up subsets inside DoD's
    | 11.0.0.0/8 etc., and it worked out because there were no
    | external BGP announcements for those ranges. But now that
    | there are, if they did not explicitly configure their border
    | gateways to route those ranges inside their networks, the
    | traffic may now leak out to DoD's pilot effort.
 
      | jasonhansel wrote:
      | Maybe DoD is trying to catch security flaws caused by
      | traffic intended for _their own_ internal networks
      | accidentally reaching the public internet? Advertising
      | those IPs publicly and logging all traffic could be a good
      | way of detecting such bugs in DoD systems.
 
        | dannyw wrote:
        | It also explains the lack of public commentary.
 
        | jasonhansel wrote:
        | Indeed. Publicly commenting on it would expose the
        | potential vulnerability (i.e. the accidental leakage of
        | traffic onto the public internet).
 
        | capableweb wrote:
        | Not sure. If the government is doing something large-
        | scale in public (like construction projects [or maybe
        | global IP routing]), they should communicate what is
        | happening before doing it, in order to not phase people.
 
        | kelnos wrote:
        | Eh, I wouldn't be surprised if an org like the Pentagon
        | is secretive about things that aren't really necessary to
        | be secrets. It's just kinda in their nature to be that
        | way (kinda like Apple's default-secrecy about products
        | and features).
        | 
        | (Also, sorry to be That Guy, but this one always gets to
        | me: in the sense you've used it, it's "faze", not
        | "phase".)
 
        | dunmalg wrote:
        | I used to work in intelligence. "Secrecy creep" has long
        | been a serious problem inside DoD. How information get
        | classified has largely been left up to low level federal
        | bureaucrats, people my father used to angrily refer to as
        | "big haired women from Mississippi". Basically, they are
        | low level federal office drones, with minimal knowledge
        | about the actual content of classified programs, who re
        | left to determine how they are classified. They start
        | with the core information of a project and classify it
        | "Top Secret". Then they take all the peripheral
        | information of that project and classify it TS as well,
        | just to be safe, because it might overlap with the core
        | info, but they have no clue because they're a GS-4 clerk
        | from Boogerville with a high school diploma. Later as
        | more content is generated in a program, stuff peripheral
        | to the previous peripheral data, which realistically
        | should be classified "Confidential" at most, it too gets
        | classified as TS because of its proximity to the
        | previously over-classified peripheral data. Lather-Rinse-
        | Repeat for a few decades and you have huge swathes of
        | widely known, utterly inconsequential information
        | classified Secret or Top Secret.
 
        | MereInterest wrote:
        | Don't answer this if it isn't legal to answer, but do you
        | have any examples you can share? I can entirely picture
        | the process, and completely believe that it happens, but
        | I don't have a mental image of what the end result looks
        | like.
 
        | spiritplumber wrote:
        | There has been a brief period in my life when I did not
        | have the clearance to read code I was writing.
 
        | withinboredom wrote:
        | From my personal experience: a cat died. A very non-
        | important cat. It was the only thing of note in my
        | report.
 
        | dwarfsandstuff wrote:
        | A random cat's death got to be top secret? Oh gawd...
 
        | wbl wrote:
        | The top secret lunch: someone ate an orange at Los
        | Alamos. That orange was top secret. This actually makes
        | some sense.
 
        | ajross wrote:
        | Right, because if there's anything the Pentagon has been
        | known for over the past seven decades or so it's clear
        | publication and transparent disclosure of all its large
        | scale classified projects so as not to phase the public.
 
        | xwolfi wrote:
        | Reading what the DOD said "officially" it appears that
        | maybe they were just looking to see if these IP could be
        | registered, simply.
        | 
        | It sounds a bit weird they would have needed 170+M ips to
        | get a good attack sample from the internet if the ip are
        | contiguous, a few thousands would have sufficed. It
        | sounds very weird to expect "China" to suddenly route
        | Xi's dirty videos and why not Iran, Japan, everyone
        | suddenly routing craps there, it's not very targetted and
        | would cost quite a bit to read all the potential tcp
        | packets that got lost by bad WAN vs LAN priority
        | decisions in routers.
        | 
        | Also, it's one shot, so why now ? They would have just
        | lost a huge weapon, if true, in a very public manner, for
        | no particular visible threat, not precise target and at
        | great cost possibly.
        | 
        | I'm okay to believe this was possibly just an
        | inventory/activation exercise because someone noticed
        | they owned stuff they can't use until they register them.
 
      | hujun wrote:
      | it is very unlikely to for a company like Alibaba not
      | configuring their BGP right
 
    | Havoc wrote:
    | Why would you do that though when there are perfectly fine
    | internal address ranges available?
 
      | twic wrote:
      | In our case, we were setting up VPN tunnels to a partner,
      | who for some reason required that the addresses on our side
      | should (appear to be) public IP addresses. So we couldn't
      | use 10/8 or 192.168/16 in (that part of) our network.
      | 
      | They didn't actually need the addresses to be routable from
      | the public internet (that was the whole point of the VPN).
      | I think the requirement was really a way of making sure
      | they were unique. I'm sure they had several partners who
      | used 10/8 internally.
 
        | GekkePrutser wrote:
        | There's also 172.16/12 :) But yeah I agree. If you're
        | running a VPN for a large company it's kinda hard to
        | avoid such conflicts.
        | 
        | In my work we use 10.0.0.0/8 but of course some people
        | use the same at home even though 192.168/16 is way more
        | common. In general I find 172.16/12 the least common in
        | the field.
 
        | jamiek88 wrote:
        | I know the old Apple extreme and time machine routers
        | used to default to 10 rather than 192 ever since then
        | I've kept my internal routing within that block.
        | 
        | It just looks nicer to me which shows the power of Apple
        | and how easily I am influenced.
 
      | [deleted]
 
      | Godel_unicode wrote:
      | I suspect there are a decent number of network engineers
      | who think it's funny to use DoD IPs for their internal
      | network, especially given what their logging system will
      | probably tell them by default.
      | 
      | If you drive around with a WiFi stumbler running, you'll
      | run into networks with names like "UTAH DATA CENTER" and
      | "SIPRnet", etc for the same reason.
 
        | imwillofficial wrote:
        | I always hated seeing "FBI Surveillance Van"
        | 
        | Made me wanna climb out of my FBI Surveillance Van and
        | have a word with them.
 
        | leesalminen wrote:
        | Ha! "Unmarked white van" is the WiFi name at my local dog
        | daycare. I got a good laugh.
 
        | dwarfsandstuff wrote:
        | My wifi is called nsa_net
 
      | Denvercoder9 wrote:
      | Two things that come to mind are running out of private
      | address space (a /8 isn't that large), or wanting address
      | space that doesn't clash with other private networks (e.g.
      | to ensure a VPN doesn't overlap with home networks).
      | There's probably more reasons.
 
        | VLM wrote:
        | > running out of private address space
        | 
        | Classic merger "solution".
        | 
        | Company A uses 10/8 Company B uses 10/8, company A buys
        | company B and orders new subsidiary B to renumber into
        | 11/8 "All you have to do is change every first octet to
        | 11"
 
        | woleium wrote:
        | or, you know, use NAT to do so :)
 
        | WanderPanda wrote:
        | how would nat help in this case?
 
        | xxpor wrote:
        | If they're not actually using the whole /8 (highly
        | likely), you can setup a 1:1 NAT. basically from network
        | b, if you want to talk to network a, you find out the
        | address in 11/8 that corresponds to the 10/8 address and
        | vice versa. You can use split horizon dns to make it
        | mostly transparent.
        | 
        | Every networking problem in the world can be solved with
        | more NAT or more encapsulation :)
 
        | jandrese wrote:
        | You don't have to use every address in 10.0.0.0/8 to
        | effectively fill it up. If your corporate policy is to
        | assign a /16 to each floor of a building, and you have a
        | LOT of buildings it's pretty easy to fill up the space
        | even if most of the /16s are sparsely populated. It's
        | much easier to move on to the 11. space when you build
        | that new building that pushes you over than renumbering
        | your entire corporate LAN.
 
        | woleium wrote:
        | what you call 1:1 NAT is just called NAT by cisco, the
        | stuff most folks think NAT is is actually NAT+PAT (like
        | what you run on your home router with a single public IP)
 
        | chiph wrote:
        | It basically maps addresses visible on one interface to
        | those on a different interface. So you can route many
        | addresses on 10.x to a single 10.x address that is on a
        | different network.
        | 
        | https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-
        | addres...
 
        | kenniskrag wrote:
        | or upgrade to ipv6 :)
 
        | ratsmack wrote:
        | or maybe ask the question regarding why we're not all
        | running ipv6.
 
        | kenniskrag wrote:
        | why?
 
      | mrkstu wrote:
      | In the case of a managed service provider I worked for,
      | using non-announced gov/mil space allowed us to inject
      | routes for monitoring purposes into the MPLS vrfs of our
      | customers so we could poll the routers without using our
      | own public space.
 
    | Godel_unicode wrote:
    | There are lots of examples of this type of "squat space"
    | being used for largely internal addressing in addition to rfc
    | 1918 space:
    | 
    | https://teamarin.net/2015/11/23/to-squat-or-not-to-squat/
 
  | motohagiography wrote:
  | If that were true, depending on path inforation, any botnet or
  | other traffic destined to those networks would end up in this
  | new AS8003 traffic sink, which would create a map of candidate
  | CCP assets to target on the internet.
  | 
  | You could do the same with any AS. I haven't looked into bgp
  | spoofing since about '99, but it seems to have matured since
  | then. The idea of using it as ephemeral canary/honeynet space
  | for tracking botnet C&C traffic seems like a reasonable play.
 
    | xwolfi wrote:
    | But the internet is not just CCP vs Captain America. I mean
    | my home network has random ips and a shit network admin, so I
    | will also send crap data to the DOD, from Hong Kong.
    | 
    | You imagine the work to figure out if my tcp heartbeats
    | between my torrent server and my nginx proxy are CCP botnets
    | or me misconfiguring my router ? From the same place kinda ?
    | And you imagine the amount of people we are in China that are
    | doing shit networking but not CCP-relevant things ?
    | 
    | And the amount of botnets we have in China that are to scam
    | each other that even the CCP doesn't want ? :D
 
      | ufmace wrote:
      | Yeah, that's why the stated explanation sounds weird.
      | 
      | Suddenly advertise this never-used block, and you're just
      | going to get a massive torrent of previously-internal
      | traffic from bazillions of organizations all over the
      | planet that used it for something internal and were
      | slightly lazy and didn't set up their routing quite right.
      | Probably 99.9% of it is of no use whatsoever to anyone
      | outside that org. It's tough to imagine that anyone thought
      | they'd get any useful information on any hostile CCP
      | activity by doing this.
      | 
      | I would also expect that any department doing hostile
      | things on the net would be at least smart enough to not let
      | any of their internal traffic leak out like that, no matter
      | who they actually worked for.
 
      | Forbo wrote:
      | I once had a client who decided to use an IP block that was
      | registered to APNIC for their internal network. Made for
      | quite the headache as I tried to track down why there was a
      | ton of traffic supposedly going to China and Japan. -__-
 
  | TechBro8615 wrote:
  | Way back when, I was working at a startup with little clue what
  | I was doing. Long story short, I setup a VPN network to connect
  | 600 devices through 8 wifi routers to a VPC. I used 11.0.0.0/8
  | because I didn't want to bother sorting through the conflicts
  | with 10.x, 192.168.x, and 172.x which were all used at various
  | places throughout the chain (e.g. the routers on 192, some
  | upstream services on 10.x and 172.)
  | 
  | All I had to do to make it work, IIRC, was add an ip routing
  | rule to prioritize our internal routing for traffic on
  | 11.0.0.0/8 instead of sending it over the default interface.
  | 
  | This solution worked fine, but it broke in weird ways and I
  | remember one time I did arp -a on one of the Amazon boxes and
  | saw some DoD registered addresses, which was a little alarming,
  | but I just chalked it up to my not understanding the details.
 
    | twic wrote:
    | I did the same with 51/8 back when that was owned by the UK
    | Department of Work and Pensions but not publicly routable.
 
| client4 wrote:
| T-mobile does the same thing.
 
| tyingq wrote:
| Still seems a bit odd to me. It doesn't explain why "GLOBAL
| RESOURCE SYSTEMS, LLC" is involved. Poking around, the
| individuals associated with that aren't government employees. The
| company was formed 9/8/2020 in Delaware.
 
  | cronix wrote:
  | If I were to guess, because private companies aren't subject to
  | FOIA requests. It's a little trick the gov't has been doing for
  | some time now to avoid legitimate, legal scrutiny by the
  | public.
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | mattkrause wrote:
    | Outsourcing to private companies also (somehow) appeases the
    | "small government" folks, even when it costs more/works
    | worse.
 
      | kdmdmdmmdmd wrote:
      | Somehow? Money the spent is money in the economy, not in
      | the government. It's pretty easy to understand, I think.
 
        | CameronNemo wrote:
        | Alternatively, money is grifted for political patronage.
 
        | kdmdmdmmdmd wrote:
        | Huh i wonder how we can prevent that problem
 
  | ttul wrote:
  | Who are the people associated with that company? I'd like to
  | further investigate them.
 
    | tyingq wrote:
    | You can look up the company name on Florida's Division of
    | Corporations:
    | http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ByName
    | 
    | The Delaware company is registered there as a an "outside of
    | the state of Florida" entity operating in Florida. Some
    | actual people names are listed. I'm fairly confident it's the
    | same company, as the Plantation, FL address is there.
 
      | anigbrowl wrote:
      | Allow me to suggest looking up their donation history at
      | https://www.fec.gov/data/
 
  | sam36 wrote:
  | The answer is clear. They sprang to life right as Trump was
  | leaving office because Biden knew he would win and though his
  | company is registered in Delaware, it is actually just a
  | Chinese front.
 
    | Lammy wrote:
    | Imagine believing in nationality as anything more than high-
    | end sports teams for the elite.
 
  | chiph wrote:
  | When you want to do some secret squirrel stuff, you start a
  | small closely-held company.
  | 
  | Wait until you read about Air America - an actual airline
  | started by Claire Chennault (of Flying Tigers fame), that was
  | bought by the CIA in the post WW-II years and used to run
  | missions in Southeast Asia up until the mid 1970's.
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)
 
  | Fnoord wrote:
  | Means nothing. Companies can be a front for a government.
 
    | tyingq wrote:
    | Well, yes, but I'm interested in "for what purpose, in this
    | specific case".
 
      | dathinab wrote:
      | The simplest would be to make sure the addresses are _not_
      | announced by the DoD, which depending on the thinks they
      | want to test could matter, or could be irrelevant.
 
| gumby wrote:
| This is a complete side point, but what does this sentence mean?
| 
| > Created in 2015, the DDS operates a Silicon Valley-like office
| within the Pentagon.
 
  | splithalf wrote:
  | Open office plan, ping pong and bean bag chairs. Slogans on the
  | walls. Sit stand desks. Lots of h1b workers. Have you never
  | silicon valley'd?
 
  | dogman144 wrote:
  | DDS hires professional engineers at a special paygrade pegged
  | to their civilian pay stubs for a 2 year tour of duty fixing
  | pressing issues in DoD tech via pretty broad authority to
  | sidestep
  | 
  | A) the usual senior military slow-roll* in the way of these
  | fixes
  | 
  | B) the sh**y govt contractors who made the tech and usually get
  | paid to fix their own bad tech.
  | 
  | DDS Hires a lot of motivated engineers who would be in civil
  | service but for the $180k -> $90k paycuts and fear of
  | bureaucratic hell. It is run by one of the ~founders of
  | opentable who, post opentable riches, was flying on 9/11/01,
  | decided to join the Chicago PD as a result, did west Chicago
  | homicide until the PD discovered his past, he then stood up
  | Chicago's data-based policing technical approaches, and
  | eventually the Obama admin heads about him asked him to take
  | over DDS (iirc, +/- details there).
  | 
  | Cool stuff and I'd work for them in a second, probably need
  | another few years in private sector though.
 
    | kelnos wrote:
    | > _DDS hires professional engineers at a special paygrade
    | pegged to their civilian pay stubs_
    | 
    | I wish USDS would do this as well; I feel like they'd attract
    | a lot more talent. Although perhaps they want to attract
    | exactly the kind of talent who would take a big pay cut out
    | of a sense of service/duty.
    | 
    | > _Cool stuff and I'd work for them in a second_
    | 
    | For myself, while I recognize that military is a necessary
    | evil in the world we live in, and I have a ton of respect for
    | the people who put themselves in harm's way, working for an
    | org with a .mil address would be against my values. I'm so
    | torn, though, since (e.g.) the Internet itself came out of
    | the DoD. It's a hard pill to swallow for me sometimes that a
    | lot of essential civilian tech was originally developed by or
    | for the military.
 
      | jamiek88 wrote:
      | Theres a strong argument that people,with this outlook are
      | needed in DOD.
      | 
      | It's the whole those who seek power are least suited to it
      | schtick.
      | 
      | I understand your reluctance and you of course make your
      | own life choices but something to consider.
 
    | kingkilr wrote:
    | I don't know Brett super well so I can't speak to the rest of
    | his background, but it's not correct that the Obama admin
    | asked him to take over DDS.
    | 
    | DDS's founding head was Chris Lynch, who served in that role
    | until the middle of the Trump administration, when he left
    | government service and that's when Brett got the job.
 
      | dogman144 wrote:
      | There ya go. +/- details.
      | 
      | I saw him present on DDS and his backstory at BSidesLV a
      | few years ago and did a bit of non-profit govt<>tech
      | chatter with the team there.
      | 
      | Correct, it was in the middle of the Trump Admin.
 
    | gumby wrote:
    | This is quite interesting -- glad I asked!
 
      | dogman144 wrote:
      | The org has done really interesting things under a few
      | different political climates. To the extent it's
      | safe/neutral to say we're entering a more pro-govt can-do
      | env, I think they'll have a cool next 4 years as an org.
      | 
      | Some of the projects they talk about doing have huge value-
      | adds to technically underserved groups like military
      | families during mandatory base moves every few years. Those
      | groups are totally dependent on following the system as
      | designed (get your travel voucher here, your goods shipped
      | here, etc) and much of it depends on single option, very
      | janky govt, almost intranet-like, porfals. Iirc, one of
      | their projects was fixing a portal was leaking SSNs like
      | gangbusters. Normal times, that's a 6 month -> 10 year
      | process to work with the contractor. DDS did it fairly
      | quickly.
 
  | lotsofpulp wrote:
  | More money, I assume. The government does not want to raise all
  | programmers' pay, so instead of adjusting the pay schedules
  | that apply to everyone, they make a special group that the
  | normal pay schedules don't apply to.
  | 
  | I wonder if it came about because how much of a dumpster fire
  | the first version of healthcare.gov was for the premier of the
  | Affordable Care Act. That probably embarrassed a lot of people.
 
    | wslack wrote:
    | healthcare.gov's problem led to a rescue team, whose members
    | helped to start USDS, whose members helped to start DDS!
    | 
    | To your first point, it'd be more accurate to say that many
    | government offices often don't hire any programmers, which
    | can (among other issues) make it challenging for those
    | offices to select strong contractors.
 
  | soared wrote:
  | The first paragraph a job description gives some context to
  | their culture:
  | 
  | > How do you feel about the cloud? Specifically, what are your
  | thoughts on the cumulus clouds of Bespin? Do you believe Cloud
  | City is composed of only cumulus clouds? Do you have any idea
  | about what we are asking? If your answer is yes, definitely
  | read on. If no, still read on, but we might find your lack of
  | faith disturbing!
 
  | wslack wrote:
  | The office has a deliberately different type of culture.
  | 
  | Edit: more info at https://www.dds.mil/about
 
    | Angostura wrote:
    | This page suggests a really interesting way of organising
    | things: https://www.dds.mil/team
 
    | gumby wrote:
    | Thanks for that informative link. I had no idea.
 
| tiernano wrote:
| when digging though some of the IPs, i came across 22.0.0.0/8,
| which if you look at the DNS tab of bgp.he.net
| (https://bgp.he.net/net/22.0.0.0/8#_dns) shows a LOT of people
| are "using" those IPs... which means a LOT of people wont be
| happy that their sites, email, dns, etc, are now essentially
| being blackholed... for me (I run AS204994), the traffic hits
| Frankfurt (i peer with HE there) goes over their network though
| Paris, then to Ashburn and then is blackholed... gone after
| that... wondering how much traffic is being seen by he.net with
| this...
 
  | icedchai wrote:
  | If they're using them for internal networks, they'll (probably)
  | work just like they did before. It's likely many folks are
  | using these as like private RFC-1918 addresses.
 
| djoldman wrote:
| https://outline.com/3HuXPj
 
| coderholic wrote:
| Some details about the ASN announcing the DoD prefixes:
| https://ipinfo.io/AS8003
| 
| It looks like they're not just announcing 11.0.0.0/8 but also a
| bunch of more specific routes, including 11.0.0.0/13 and
| 11.0.0.0/24
| 
| It looks like currently their only peer is Hurricane Electric:
| https://ipinfo.io/AS6939
 
  | cptskippy wrote:
  | One peer? Does that mean all that traffic is flowing through
  | Hurricane Electric?
 
| [deleted]
 
| drawkbox wrote:
| > _Defense Digital Service (DDS) authorized a pilot effort
| advertising DoD Internet Protocol (IP) space using Border Gateway
| Protocol (BGP). This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent
| unauthorized use of DoD IP address space. Additionally, this
| pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities. This is one of
| DoD's many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber
| posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats.
| We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential
| vulnerabilities are mitigated._
| 
| Interesting, seems an effort to find out who was abusing ranges
| that were exclusively allowed or disallowed based on the ranges.
| Malware that tries to look like something else that uses a state
| level IP range to evade blocking, or check for blocks.[1]
| 
| > _I interpret this to mean that the objectives of this effort
| are twofold. First, to announce this address space to scare off
| any would-be squatters, and secondly, to collect a massive amount
| of background internet traffic for threat intelligence._
| 
| > _On the first point, there is a vast world of fraudulent BGP
| routing out there. As I've documented over the years, various
| types of bad actors use unrouted address space to bypass
| blocklists in order to send spam and other types of malicious
| traffic._
| 
| Cloudflare example shows how much traffic some of these ranges
| that are included/excluded have when turned on.
| 
| > _On the second, there is a lot of background noise that can be
| scooped up when announcing large ranges of IPv4 address space. A
| recent example is Cloudflare's announcement of 1.1.1.0 /24 and
| 1.0.0.0/24 in 2018._
| 
| > _For decades, internet routing operated with a widespread
| assumption that ASes didn't route these prefixes on the internet
| (perhaps because they were canonical examples from networking
| textbooks). According to their blog post soon after the launch,
| Cloudflare received "~10Gbps of unsolicited background traffic"
| on their interfaces._
| 
| > _And that was just for 512 IPv4 addresses! Of course, those
| addresses were very special, but it stands to reason that 175
| million IPv4 addresses will attract orders of magnitude more
| traffic. More misconfigured devices and networks that mistakenly
| assumed that all of this DoD address space would never see the
| light of day._
| 
| Looks like a new cybersecurity policy/process started on
| inauguration day. Probably a defensive or offensive measure to
| combat the supply chain attacks that may well have used those
| ranges in evading blocking.
| 
| [1] https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-mystery-of-as8003/
 
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