To a company that has the authority to manage IPv4 held by the US Department of Defense… The reason is?

On January 20, when former President Donald Trump retired, the world was distracted. The company, founded in September 2020, received authority to manage 56 million IPv4 addresses held by the U.S. Department of Defense right after Trump retired, and that number rose to 175 million after three months.

If you say 175 million cases, it is 6% of all 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses. There are so many IPs that private companies have about large telecommunications companies. An official from the US Department of Defense Defense Digital Service says the move is part of a pilot project to study and prevent unauthorized use of IP addresses held by the military. In addition, the US Department of Defense said it still retains the authority to manage IP addresses.

It’s not clear what the GRS is doing specifically. Also, the government contract information is not conspicuous and there is no public website, so we do not know what the company is doing. According to one theory, the company is known to have a team called Defense Digital Services directly under the defense minister.

The Pentagon and the military may try to use expert team knowledge to prevent hostile governments and cybercriminals from stealing IP addresses held by the Department of Defense but not in use. As a result, security experts speculate that the US Department of Defense may be able to obtain information such as how an attacker is doing online and whether there are configuration errors that need to be caught before something happens. Related information can be found here.