Pentagon reclaims 6% of the entire internet that was mysteriously handed over to a Florida company on the day Trump left office

 Minutes before former President Donald Trump left office, a shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank took control over a large chunk of internet space owned by the Pentagon.   

Now the Department of Defense has reclaimed the 175 million IP addresses - about six percent the size of the entire current internet - from Global Resource Systems LLC, which is headquartered in Plantation, Florida, the Washington Post reported Friday.  

'It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,' said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company.

It's also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon. 

+4

Minutes before President Joe Biden was sworn into office, a shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank took control over a large chunk of internet space owned by the Pentagon

+4

Donald Trump leaves his New York City Trump Tower residence flanked by his Secret Service agents as he waved to the crowd that gathered

The sell off of Internet space sparked theories the Pentagon could be eventually responding to repeated demands to monetize its collections of millions of dormant web pages.  

The military said it hoped to 'assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,' according to a statement issued in April by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service, which ran the project. 

But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until last September.

+4

Global Resource Systems LLC lists its address in a co-working space above this bank in Plantation, Florida. A receptionist there had not heard of the firm 

+4

The sell off of Internet space sparked theories the Pentagon could be eventually responding to repeated demands to monetize its collections of millions of dormant web pages

'The Defense Digital Service established a plan to launch the cybersecurity pilot and then transition control of the initiative to DoD partners,' Defense Department Spokesperson Russell Goemaere told The Washington Post.

'Following the DDS pilot, shifting DoD Internet Protocol (IP) advertisement to DoD's traditional operations and mature network security processes, maintains consistency across the DODIN. This allows for active management of the IP space and ensure the Department has the operational maneuver space necessary to maintain and improve DODIN resiliency,' the statement said.

When program was launched in the fall, Goemaere said the timing of the transfer was 'agnostic of administration change.' 

It is still unclear what exactly the program did or why Global Resource Systems LLC was chosen.