I came across this article by the Associated Press in the Military Times today. This is the first I have heard of this, and it sounds pretty out there. I’ll let you read the first paragraph to get the gist of it.

A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.

The reason that the DOD gave for this doesn’t really explain much.

The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. It also hopes to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of efforts to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries, who are consistently infiltrating U.S. networks, sometimes operating from unused internet address blocks.

So the DOD is gobbling up a ton of IP addresses, but the reason is pretty vague. The rest of the article just makes the whole thing look even more strange. The company that is said to be responsible is Global Resource Systems LLC which doesn’t really have a presence on the web at all. It was incorporated in Delaware and the guy supposedly running things, Raymond Saulino, is pretty much unreachable. He is linked to a couple of other companies that have a UPS Store in Virginia as a business address.

Someone did get in touch with a Rodney Joffe, who used to be a colleague of Raymond, and all he said was that he thought Saulino was retired.

The whole thing is fishy. Just imagine what someone could do with a ton of IP addresses and bad intentions. The number that is now under this secret company’s control is somewhere around 175 million addresses.

Read the whole article though, I just caught the stuff that stuck out at me.

I think something nefarious may be afoot.