Confronting Address Space Hijackers

Tawn writes "There's a great story on SecurityFocus about hijackers taking over large allocations of IPv4 space with forged documents and false business fronts. Los Angeles County and some big multinationals have had /16's pulled out from under them in the last few months, and used to inject spam. ARIN and network operators are trying to get a handle on the problem. The owner of a webhosting company that wound up with L.A. County's /16 called it 'borrowed space,' and said he paid $500 for it to a guy he met online."

Comments

Does LA county even need a public /16?

[realdpk]

Judging by the article, LA county was using that /16 for internal routing only. I understand that they probably got it when it was easy to get, but do they really still need it? On that note, how much IP space that is allocated is actually in use? I heard something like 25%..

Re:Does LA county even need a public /16?

[Yuan-Lung]

Does it make sense for some people to have multiple mensions while some others can't find a place to live?
Does it make sense for a small group people to hug a huge chunk of the worlds, while the others starve?
But hey, that's how the world works, for now and the foreseeable future, anyways.

Re:Hijackers?

[koh]

Sitting on that quantity of Unused IP adresses is just as criminal.

I do agree with you here, but... ever heard about natural selection ?

IPv4 addresses have been designed in a time when there were at most a dozen people expecting IP to be used by more than a million users in the future. Just like the w2k bug (failed to) prove, old things should eventually die so that new ones can take the free slot. Yup, just like spammers should die so that other people may use those IP slots, but I digress.

IPv6 is here and would resolve the problem. This requires a huge switch however, and people won't be ready for it unless natural selection proves IPv4 hopelessly doomed.

So let spammers accumulate IPv4 addresses just a little more ;)