On the day Biden was sworn in, something very strange happened in the Internet world: the Pentagon quietly transferred $175 million Internet addresses worth $4 billion to a mysterious company managing a shared workspace in Florida, a transfer about 4 percent the size of the entire Internet. It is also more than twice the amount of Internet space actually used by the Pentagon. And the recipient of these IP addresses is also mysterious.
The obscure company, located in a shared workspace above a bank in Florida, is now managing a huge, previously unused chunk of Internet resources owned by the U.S. Department of Defense. The venture was launched last September.
The transfer of the unused DoD IP addresses occurred just minutes before Trump left office.
“It’s huge. It’s the biggest thing in the history of the Internet,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analytics at network operations firm Kentik.
The transfer of Internet space has sparked speculation that the Pentagon may have made the final decision to sell its collection of millions of dormant Web pages, the Daily Mail reported.
However, Defense Department spokesman Russell Goemaere told The Associated Press on Saturday that the newly announced address space is not being sold. Despite the Internet address crunch, the Pentagon, which created the Internet, has shown no interest in selling its address space. The authorities’ claim is said to be that the addresses are being given to the venture for management.
The Pentagon regularly deals with unauthorized use of its space, in part because of a shortage of first-generation Internet addresses that has persisted since 2011; each address is now being auctioned for $25.
But what a Pentagon spokesman didn’t explain Saturday (April 24) was why the Defense Department chose Global Resource Systems LLC, a company with no record of government contracts, to manage the address space, which didn’t exist until last September. The company did not exist until last September.
Authorities also did not say whether the “pilot program” involved outside contractors. It also previously wanted to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of an effort to defend against global adversary cyber intrusions.
Paul Vixie, CEO of Farsight Security, said, “I’m a little confused, as you are, as to why the Defense Department would do this.” Vixie, an Internet pioneer, is credited with designing its naming system.
The business that received the address is also mysterious, as the company called Global Resource Systems Ltd. does not have a Web site, although it does have the domain name grscorp.com. When an Associated Press reporter asked a company representative at the office earlier this month, a receptionist didn’t have an answer for that information either; nor does the business’s name appear in Plantation, Florida’s directory of residences.
A Daily Mail reporter found the company’s name on a list of tenants and attempted to send an e-mail. Records show that the company is not licensed to do business in the Plantation area.
In addition, a receptionist at the location had not heard of the company. A reporter visiting the address did not find any corporate representatives and was told that they needed to leave.
“Global Resource Systems, LLC, registered in Delaware by a Beverly Hills attorney, now manages more Internet space than China Telecom, AT&T, or Comcast after receiving IP addresses from the Department of Defense.
The only name associated with it in the Florida Business Register matches the name of a managing member of a company recently listed in Nevada corporate records as a network security/Internet monitoring equipment company called Packet Forensics.
In the company records, Global Resource Systems, LLC and Packet Forensics share the same address, a UPS store, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The two have different mailbox numbers.
Packet Forensics has had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, and its clients include the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
That man, Raymond Saulino, is also listed as the head of a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates, which was formed in 2018 and licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in April 2020.
Instead, calls to the numbers listed in the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing were answered by an automated service that offered four different options, but did not connect callers to an option, and all calls were recycled to the initial voice recording.
Solino did not return calls seeking comment, and Rodney Joffe, a longtime colleague who works at Packet Forensics, said he believes Solino has retired, but he declined to comment further, according to the report. Joffe, a cybersecurity expert, is chief technology officer at Neustar, which provides Internet intelligence and services to major industries, including telecommunications and defense.
In 2011, Packet Forensics and its spokesman Solino were featured in Wired magazine after the company sold government agencies and law enforcement a device that allowed them to monitor people’s Web browsing using forged security credentials.
According to its website, the company continues to sell “legitimate interception” devices. And one of its current contracts with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency “leverages autonomy to counter cyber countermeasures.
One contract describes Packet Forensics as investigating ‘technologies to conduct secure, uninterrupted, and effective active defense operations in cyberspace.
And its 2019 contract says the program will “investigate the feasibility of creating secure and reliable autonomous software organizations” that can effectively combat malicious botnet implants and similar large-scale malware.
But what deepens the mystery is the name of Global Resource Systems, which is the same name as a company sued by independent Internet fraud researcher Ron Guilmette, who used the same Internet road signs to send spam.
The company closed more than a decade ago. The difference was the type of company. This later company was a limited liability company. The other was a corporation. Both were in the Plantation area, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, and used the same street address.
It’s very suspicious,” said Gilmette, who unsuccessfully sued the previous incarnation of Global Resource Systems in 2006 for unfair business practices.
Gilmette believes the disguise is a clumsy tactic in this case.’ If they had wanted to conceal the matter more seriously, they could have done so without using the dubious names of Solino and Global Resource Systems.
Gilmette and Madori were told of the mystery in mid-March when network operators began asking about it on an e-mail list. But almost everyone involved was reluctant to talk about it.
Nor did Mike Leber, owner of Hurricane Electric, the Internet backbone that handles address block traffic, respond to e-mails or phone messages, according to the report.
Some cybersecurity experts speculate that the Pentagon may have used the newly announced space to create a “honeypot” (decoy), a vulnerable machine set up to attract hackers.
In a blog post on the matter Saturday, Madori said that, alternatively, it may be looking to build specialized infrastructure – software and servers – to search for suspicious activity in traffic. And that greatly increases the space they can monitor.”
Madori said advertising the address space would make it easier to drive out occupants and allow the U.S. military to “collect a lot of background Internet messages for threat intelligence.”
However, this claim can only be speculation, and the Pentagon’s true motives remain unknown.
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