And now it’s done. Kind of.
The IP addresses had never been sold or leased to the company, merely put under its control for the pilot program, created by an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense and bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” that solves emergency problems and conducts experimental work for the military.
But the Pentagon statement shed little new light on exactly what the pilot program was doing or why it now has ended. It’s clear, though, that its mission has been extended even as it comes more formally under Pentagon control.
On the unusual timing of the start of the pilot program — which began the transfer of control of IP addresses at 11:57 a.m. on Inauguration Day, three minutes before President Biden took office — Goemaere added, “The decision to launch and the scheduling of the DDS pilot effort was agnostic of administration change. The effort was planned and initiated in the Fall of 2020. It was launched in mid-January 2021 when the required infrastructure was in place. Given the opportunity, maintaining low visibility was also desirable in order to observe traffic in its current state, allowing us to identify potential vulnerabilities and assess and mitigate potential cyber threats.”
In April, Madory, a former Air Force officer, had come to believe the program was intended to collect intelligence. By announcing control of such a large section of the Internet — especially one the Pentagon had left mothballed for years — it likely was possible to reroute information flowing across the Internet to military networks for examination and analysis.
“There are a lot of networks that inadvertently leak out vulnerabilities,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve been scooping that noise up for the past few months.”
Such tactics, he added, can allow cyberspies to discover weaknesses in the networks of adversaries or potentially detect evidence of how adversaries are surveilling your own networks, to help inform the creation of better defenses.
Madory shared one more tantalizing fact: His analysis of traffic flowing through the Internet addresses once controlled by Global Resource Systems are still leading to the same place as they have for most of the year — a computer router in Ashburn, Va., a major hub of Internet connections for government agencies and private companies — despite the official resumption of Pentagon control.
And now it’s done. Kind of.
The IP addresses had never been sold or leased to the company, merely put under its control for the pilot program, created by an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense and bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” that solves emergency problems and conducts experimental work for the military.
But the Pentagon statement shed little new light on exactly what the pilot program was doing or why it now has ended. It’s clear, though, that its mission has been extended even as it comes more formally under Pentagon control.
On the unusual timing of the start of the pilot program — which began the transfer of control of IP addresses at 11:57 a.m. on Inauguration Day, three minutes before President Biden took office — Goemaere added, “The decision to launch and the scheduling of the DDS pilot effort was agnostic of administration change. The effort was planned and initiated in the Fall of 2020. It was launched in mid-January 2021 when the required infrastructure was in place. Given the opportunity, maintaining low visibility was also desirable in order to observe traffic in its current state, allowing us to identify potential vulnerabilities and assess and mitigate potential cyber threats.”
In April, Madory, a former Air Force officer, had come to believe the program was intended to collect intelligence. By announcing control of such a large section of the Internet — especially one the Pentagon had left mothballed for years — it likely was possible to reroute information flowing across the Internet to military networks for examination and analysis.
“There are a lot of networks that inadvertently leak out vulnerabilities,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve been scooping that noise up for the past few months.”
Such tactics, he added, can allow cyberspies to discover weaknesses in the networks of adversaries or potentially detect evidence of how adversaries are surveilling your own networks, to help inform the creation of better defenses.
Madory shared one more tantalizing fact: His analysis of traffic flowing through the Internet addresses once controlled by Global Resource Systems are **still leading to the same place **as they have for most of the year — a computer router in **Ashburn, Va., a major hub of Internet **connections for government agencies and private companies — despite the official resumption of Pentagon control.
And now it’s done. Kind of.
The IP addresses had never been sold or leased to the company, merely put under its control for the pilot program, created by an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense and bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” that solves emergency problems and conducts experimental work for the military.
But the Pentagon statement shed little new light on exactly what the pilot program was doing or why it now has ended. It’s clear, though, that its mission has been extended even as it comes more formally under Pentagon control.
On the unusual timing of the start of the pilot program — which began the transfer of control of IP addresses at 11:57 a.m. on Inauguration Day, three minutes before President Biden took office — Goemaere added, “The decision to launch and the scheduling of the DDS pilot effort was agnostic of administration change. The effort was planned and initiated in the Fall of 2020. It was launched in mid-January 2021 when the required infrastructure was in place. Given the opportunity, maintaining low visibility was also desirable in order to observe traffic in its current state, allowing us to identify potential vulnerabilities and assess and mitigate potential cyber threats.”
In April, Madory, a former Air Force officer, had come to believe the program was intended to collect intelligence. By announcing control of such a large section of the Internet — especially one the Pentagon had left mothballed for years — it likely was possible to reroute information flowing across the Internet to military networks for examination and analysis.
“There are a lot of networks that inadvertently leak out vulnerabilities,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve been scooping that noise up for the past few months.”
Such tactics, he added, can allow cyberspies to discover weaknesses in the networks of adversaries or potentially detect evidence of how adversaries are surveilling your own networks, to help inform the creation of better defenses.
Madory shared one more tantalizing fact: His analysis of traffic flowing through the Internet addresses once controlled by Global Resource Systems are still leading to the same place as they have for most of the year — a computer router in Ashburn, Va., a major hub of Internet connections for government agencies and private companies — despite the official resumption of Pentagon control.