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

washingtonpost.com

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

#71

Post by walrus01 »

fred256 wrote: post #70
pgn674 wrote: 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?

Not just Chinese companies. I know of one FAANG company that used internal IP addresses in the 11.0.0.0/8 space (in addition to, not instead of, RFC 1918 space).

Every time I've seen this it's because of inefficient and wasteful use of 10/8 internally. Like, not every tiny site or thing needs a /24. Once the wasteful use becomes entrenched as a practice, it would be very labor intensive and time-consuming to go on a renumbering plan. As compared to the effort to just use 11/8.

And then ultimately because of refusal to get over the technical hurdle of using IPv6 for internal management.

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

#72

Post by chiph »

WanderPanda wrote: post #62
woleium wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or, you know, use NAT to do so :)

how would nat help in this case?

It basically maps addresses visible on one interface to those on a different interface. So you can route many addresses on 10.x to a single 10.x address that is on a different network.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-addres...

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

#73

Post by Lammy »

sam36 wrote: post #32
tyingq wrote: post #20

Still seems a bit odd to me. It doesn't explain why "GLOBAL RESOURCE SYSTEMS, LLC" is involved. Poking around, the individuals associated with that aren't government employees. The company was formed 9/8/2020 in Delaware.

The answer is clear. They sprang to life right as Trump was leaving office because Biden knew he would win and though his company is registered in Delaware, it is actually just a Chinese front.

Imagine believing in nationality as anything more than high-end sports teams for the elite.

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

#74

Post by chiph »

tyingq wrote: post #20

Still seems a bit odd to me. It doesn't explain why "GLOBAL RESOURCE SYSTEMS, LLC" is involved. Poking around, the individuals associated with that aren't government employees. The company was formed 9/8/2020 in Delaware.

When you want to do some secret squirrel stuff, you start a small closely-held company.

Wait until you read about Air America - an actual airline started by Claire Chennault (of Flying Tigers fame), that was bought by the CIA in the post WW-II years and used to run missions in Southeast Asia up until the mid 1970's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)

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

#76

Post by frombody »

yftsui wrote: post #75

Previous story in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006534 . This article is exaggerating by saying it happened overnight, which started actually 5 years ago.

Global Resource Systems LLC was only created in September of last year.

It is very much worth asking who this legal entity is and why a private company is better suited to these efforts than the government.

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

#78

Post by yftsui »

frombody wrote: post #76
yftsui wrote: post #75

Previous story in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006534 . This article is exaggerating by saying it happened overnight, which started actually 5 years ago.

Global Resource Systems LLC was only created in September of last year. It is very much worth asking who this legal entity is and why a private company is better suited to these efforts than the government.

I read the article but I believe the key point is since when 11.x.x.x stopped being dormant addresses, instead of these IPs just transferred ownership but not “dormant”.

As an interesting fact, when searching “aliyun 11.0.0.0” which is the mentioned Chinese cloud provider I believe, they apparently has been using that as internal IPs since 2015 as well

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

#79

Post by LinuxBender »

jeroenhd wrote: post #46
walrus01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of those less-cluefull operators include Juniper and Azure[1], Cisco[2][3], and probably many other companies. When Cloudflare put its 1.1.1.1 DNS server into use, it started receiving huge amounts of packets destined to unroutable addresses because the 1.0.0.0/8 space was (mostly?) unused. If you configure your routers correctly, none of these IP addresses should resolve, anyway. If something in your network is…

I know of a couple companies that used 1.0.0.0/8 as their internal VPN/WAN network. Myself and others explained why this could be problematic but we were ignored. It's actually mostly fine as long as you 1) never need to reach that network and 2) block traffic in that network from leaving your edge network and 3) triple-check that you have blocked that network from ever being announced from your routers. Downside being you have to double or triple NAT to reach anything in that network. Hamachi uses or used 25/8 ministry of defense as their VPN network.

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

#80

Post by echelon »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #38
pelagic_sky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"edit: Downvotes? Really?" is a surefire method of attracting downvotes.

I got -4 in downvotes. (-2 before my edit.) I don't know what's going on.

I understand when I call out Apple or Google for bad behavior that I can attract downvotes. Sometimes my posts are snarky, and I understand in that case too.

But I can point to instances where posts I made days ago were all downvoted in unison. Or completely informational threads where every single one of my comments gets a downvote or two.

Just a few days ago I got downvoted the second after I posted a comment. I spotted a typo immediately after submitting, clicked edit, and found myself downvoted before anyone could have possibly even read my comment (it was long). Maybe it was a mis-click -- who knows? But it was great feedback after having just submitted. And in concert with all the other recent downvotes, it's frustrating...

I've been sitting at the same "karma" value for months, and I don't think I'm being a bad member of the community.

It's more than likely noise, but it's got me rattled. It's not actionable feedback. With the pandemic and lack of social contact with other engineers, and this sort of judgement, I don't like it. I honestly don't think I'm being a nuisance.

(And here this comment is with downvotes and no comments. Sigh.)

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