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Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

washingtonpost.com

11–20 of 257 posts

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#11
post #6

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 th…

Don't criticise lord bezos

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#12
post #7

"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?

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.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#13
post #6

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 th…

I don’t know why you’re being down voted. It’s an interesting idea.

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.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#14
post #8
post #7

"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?

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.

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.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#15
post #7

"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?

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.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#16
post #8
post #7

"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?

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.

Why would you do that though when there are perfectly fine internal address ranges available?

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#18
post #7

"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?

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.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#19
post #8
post #7

"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?

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.

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/

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