Re:Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to...
by ev1 on Saturday April 24, 2021 @07:58PM
(#26929242)
> If China or Russia would suddenly reroute a ton of traffic from outside their countries, to their respective government agencies
It is their IP space. It is entirely on your incompetent network staff if you are stealing IPs that are 1) not yours, 2) in use, 3) not in your country for internal use and on top of that, not rejecting external routes to it.
It is not "rerouting a ton of traffic", the traffic was destined toward them in the first place.
Re:Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to...
by Galanwe on Saturday April 24, 2021 @11:26PM
(#26930127)
These IPs have been unused since so long, that using these for private networks is absolutely not uncommon.
Somehow the discussion seem to point to China and Russia, but I know a ton of EU companies that use these ranges.
Re:Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to...
by freeflight on Saturday April 24, 2021 @08:13PM
(#26929293)
You can debate semantics all you want, it doesn't change the reality of the situation and how the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion is very real and not just down to "incompetent network staff".
The DoD sitting on all that unused address space actively contributed to that problem and now it's exploiting band-aid fixes around it to once again play data kranken of the world under the guise of "We are just fighting APT!".
Re:Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to...
by bombcar on Saturday April 24, 2021 @08:45PM
(#26929442)
It’s pretty clear that the DoD realizes how close they were to being forced to sell all that IP space off and wouldn’t have even been able to say “we’re using it” as it wasn’t routed.
Re:Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to...
by oarsinsync on Sunday April 25, 2021 @05:40AM
(#26931490)
IP address space doesn’t have to be announced to the internet in order to be in use, or require global uniqueness.
Re:Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to...
by alisonkisk on Saturday April 24, 2021 @09:34PM
(#26929615)
Look, if you want to come someone's IP address for your internal network, that's fine, what you do in your private network is your business. But don't blame the owner when they say "hi, I exist" and you forgot to configure your routers to ignore them. It's not the DoD's fault that other netops didn't bother break the rules in a safe way.
> What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses. Madory said his monitoring showed the broad movements of Internet traffic began immediately after the IP addresses were announced Jan. 20.
> Madory said such large amounts of data could provide several benefits for those in a position to collect and analyze it for threat intelligence and other purposes.
It's interesting how this is framed as something "defensive in nature", when it's yet another massive funnel for data being slurped up by a US government agency.
If China or Russia would suddenly reroute a ton of traffic from outside their countries, to their respective government agencies, I doubt anybody would believe a benign "Just checking our security!" explanation.