Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

I know somebody who basically stole a class A IP network many years ago, in the very early days of IPV4. (He wouldn't tell me which one, but he had inside knowledge of how the system worked, and I know his background, so I believe him. ;)

The huge company that owned it went out of business, so he registered their domain name, and sent in an email to authorize the transfer.

Once you've got a hot class A network on your hands, but don't have 16,777,216 computers to use it, what can you possibly with it? How do you launder it?

It's not as if you can hide it in your garage, file the serial number off, repaint it, and put them all up for sale on the black market or ipBay individually!

Given that there are 24 bits for host identifiers, the total number of possible addresses in a Class A network is: 2^24 = 16,777,216

However, two addresses within that range are reserved: The "all zeros" host address is reserved as the network address, and the "all ones" host address is reserved as the broadcast address for the network. So count those out.

Therefore, the number of usable IP addresses in a Class A network is: 16,777,216 - 2 = 16,777,214

And at today's price of at least $15 a pop, 16,777,214 addresses × $15/address = $251,658,210

He ended up trading it under the table to a company that could use it, in exchange for the promise of free service for life.

I can believe a class B or C block. They gave those out like candy up until the mid 90's. Class A is hard to believe though. There weren't a ton of those.

I do know folks who have "defacto" control of legacy blocks belonging to defunct organizations. In fact, if you look hard enough, you can find entire ASNs full of them. Basically, IP squatters.

This story is hard to believe as told.

Even back in the early days of the internet, non-government Class A blocks were few and far between. I doubt there was a form you could fill out and authorize a transfer to a random individual by merely having an e-mail address and a domain name.

Even if you could finagle a transfer by impersonating the company via e-mail, that would be a clear case of fraud and theft from the defunct company's assets. You couldn't actually expect to use or sell the block without anyone noticing.

> He ended up trading it under the table to a company that could use it, in exchange for the promise of free service for life.

If the story is true, what likely happened is that they coordinated the actual sale through proper channels and laughed at your friends' fraud, er, antics, choosing to give him a token gesture instead of actually buying anything from him.

The ham radio /8 was also "stolen" and resold, although for a good cause.

Nobody's going to run a /8 on a single LAN segment.

If you want maximum efficiency, your hosts all have RFC1918 IPs and you route the public IP addresses to them. zero wastage, everything usable.

That's the joke! Imagine not getting caught these day running a giant routable stolen class A network on a single LAN segment. It would require Trump-level audacity!

I have unfortunately seen that many a time.

When I went to college in the mid 90's, the entire campus was on a /16, flat network, every machine had a 255.255.0.0 netmask. There was no subnetting, everything was switched (they said "bridged" at the time.)

With today's switches, you could do much crazier things. Definitely not an /8 though.

That’s it? Free service?

The problem is a /8 is too big to transact on. Somebody is going to ask questions, and then the scam will be unwound at best, you'll end up in jail at worst.

If he had taken a defunct entity's /16 (class B), it could probably have been marketed more directly. Although, I'm assuming this was long enough ago that it might have been still quite possible to get a previously unused class B from ARIN.

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