In an effort to locate holes in its network, it was reported the the US Department of Defense has given a small Florida company control over about 175 million IP addresses, says The Washington Post
On January 20, Global Resource Systems has started to manage the IP addresses as a “pilot effort” to “identify potential vulnerabilities” and “prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” as what the spokesperson of Pentagon told the Post.
It was made clear the the Department of Defense still owns the IP address.
According to the Post, Global Resource Systems was founded in September and was not able to find any other federal contracts for the company or any public-facing website.
In charge of this initiative is a group within the Pentagon called Defense Digital Service. The group solves problems and does technology experiments for the military. The Defense Digital Service group reports directly to the secretary of defense.
The exact task of Global Resource Systems hasn’t been exactly disclosed, however, the Post found out that it sent a “fire hose of internet traffic” at the DoD IP addresses. One security expert hypothesizes that it might give the DoD information on how attackers operate online and any other misconfigurations that need to be repaired.
