The U.S. Department of Defense has given a private company control over a massive part of its unused internet space. The Florida-based company, identified in news reports as Global Resource Systems, now controls more than 175 million IP addresses belonging to the military. An IP address is a number given to each computer when it is connected to the internet. The addresses have long been owned by the Defense Department, but were not being used by the agency. Experts in the computer networking industry had been wondering about the change, which happened the day President Joe Biden was sworn into office in January. Military officials made no official announcement about the move. The huge number of IP addresses involved has been estimated to be about 1/25th the size of the current internet. It is also thought to be more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon. “It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” expert Doug Madory told The Associated Press. He is the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that designs and operates computer networks. The Defense Department confirmed the change in a statement by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent” the “unauthorized use” of agency IP address space, the statement said. It added that the “pilot project” also aims to identify possible “vulnerabilities” that could lead to internet attacks by international groups attempting to break into U.S. networks.
