Kevin Shalvey
Apr 25, 2021, 8:02 AM
The Pentagon. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
- A Florida firm took over a slice of the internet owned by the Pentagon during Biden's inauguration.
- It now controls nearly 175 million IP addresses, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
- That was more than either AT&T or Comcast controlled, The Associated Press reported.
A mysterious Florida company is said to have taken control of a substantial portion of the internet owned by the Pentagon, only three minutes before President Donald Trump's official term in office ended.
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.
The company was identified as Global Resource Systems LLC, with headquarters in Plantation, Florida. According to Florida state records, Global Resource Systems filed paperwork in October 2020. The paperwork said it was incorporated in Delaware.
A Department of Defense spokesperson told the AP in a statement that the government was publicizing the space to "assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space."
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, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a networking information provider, detailed the "great mystery."
On inauguration day, at 16:57 UTC, or 11:57am 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.
The post came from an entity known as AS8003, which announced it had taken over unused ranges of the IPv4 internet space owned by the Department of Defense, according to Madory.
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."
The AP and Post sent reporters to the listed address for the Global Resource Systems, according to reports. Both times, the reporters were turned away without information.
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