The Great $50M African IP Address Heist | Hacker News Reader

The Great $50M African IP Address Heist

krebsonsecurity.com

129 pointsfeross44 comments

Silly criminal, you're supposed to resign from your regulatory job first, then found a company to steal (er, efficiently allocate using the free market) public resources the next day!

Public-private partnerships allow this sort of vulture capitalism without resigning. Or, have your friends do it.

Public-private organizations, but capitalism takes all the blame naturally. It's the perfect material for selling people on pure state-run businesses to less informed citizens IMO.

Don't get me wrong though, the public/private trend of the last two decades really has been a cancer on society. I wish more market-leaning people realized this, since a ton of conservatives push it as some half-baked solution to "big government". We're all sold these benefits of "free" markets when the organization looks or operates nothing like a marketplace with legitimate competition nor with the transparency or responsibility towards externalities that public organizations bring.

It really is an opaque proxy for politicians and corrupt business leaders in the community whose only skill is working gov contract systems to have even less transparency and plunder public money. It's a worse-worse solution, gift wrapped as some more efficient pseudo-market.

We need a stronger divide between either private or public. These compromised middle grounds are a disaster. The US health market is the obvious example but there are a thousands of smaller ones in every municipality.

I wish more people would realize this _this_ is the crux of the problem. It's not Socialism or Capitalism, it's corruption.

And what drives this neither "socialism or capitalism" corruption? Not the hunt for extracting profit by any means?

One might argue that it is simple greed, which is enabled by the concentration of power, which happens both with economic power and regulatory power.

And on top of that, one might argue that humanity is highly self-interested by nature, and people with the greatest self-interest will be much more likely to obtain power.

How self-interested someone is highly depends on the individual and their culture. Glorifying egoism, as common in capitalism, makes things worse than they have to be.

For this reason, we must glorify not-egoism and those selfless luminaries of Communism such as Stalin and Mao who would otherwise be forgotten. Indeed, the cult of personality where the middle class seeks anonymous salaryman status is the true danger.

Actually, we must glorify Stalin and Mao because literally the only other alternative is an Ancap dystopia in which homosexuality is <s>illegal</s> against the proprietors' covenant and children are traded on the free market.

While there is an aspect of self-interest in humans, I find that we are often a lot more altruistic than we are generally given credit for.

In this article dedicated to cooperation between drivers, it says that around half of them are quite cooperative: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/giving-autonomous-ca...

That behaviour split definitely sounds like an exploratory algorithm at work.

Could also be power itself. Not sure if you've experienced this. I've seen it in the military and in my current workplace where people seek power over other people and don't care as much about the compensation. There's something about controlling others that is intoxicating for some.

Why would these spam marketing companies want to buy IPv4 addresses? Would IPv6 not work? Or were they trying to assume the identity and reputation of the companies that owned the IPv4 addresses previously?

Edit: Sendgrid answered my question in this post quite well https://sendgrid.com/blog/where-is-ipv6-in-email/

Everybody on the internet has access to IPv4, the same is not true of IPv6 as of the end of 2019. IPv6 addresses are also pretty easy to get without doing shady deals.

For spam purposes, IPv6 is just as rare as IPv4... you can generally assume that anyone in a /64 is the same owner.

... so really if you have 1000 IPv4 or 1000 /64 IPv6 it's about the same number of IPs that you can use to spam from.

I'm not sure how tolerated this is on HN, but I'm lazy to research background on this. Could you please explain what a /64 is and why it is significant in this regard?

From Wikipedia: "The standard size of a subnet in IPv6 is 2^64 addresses, more than 4 billion times the size of the entire IPv4 address space."

What he's saying is that one /64 address allocation is as useful to a spammer as a single IPv4 address.

A netblock. A "/n" means "a block of IP addresses where the first n bits are the same".

This comes from the CIDR notation 192.168.1.0/24 indicating the netblock from 192.168.1.0 - 192.168.1.255.

So the number after the slash corresponds to a network size. The smaller the number, the more bits are variable, i.e. the bigger the netblock.

An IPv4 /24 has 32 (address length) - 24 = 8 bits that are variable, i.e. 2^8 addresses. A /18 would have 32-18 = 14 variable bits, i.e. 2^14 addresses.

In IPv6, the address length is 128. A /64 (which happens to be the smallest routable network size in IPv6) is 2^64 addresses - but because it's easy to get large IPv6 netblocks (typical ISP allocations are /64, /56, and you can often get a /48 with relative ease), for abuse blocking purposes, you generally treat the entire /64 or even /56 as one entity (i.e. you ignore the rightmost 64 or 72 bits).

A /56 is 2^8 separate /64s. A /48 is 2^16 separate /64s.

That was very informative for me, thanks!

Since none of us know exactly how much you already know about IP routing, we’ll likely either waste time providing an answer that assumes knowledge you don’t yet have, or waste time providing extraneous detail you don’t need.

I suggest googling something along the lines of “ipv6 allocation 56 64“ sans quotes.

[Edit: never mind; the HN community seems quite generous with their time today.]

The problem is that thinking for someone else doesn't "teach them to fish (learn independently)" and "be the change you seek," rather it enables co-dependency on others.

Conversely, searching for the meaning of a forward slash is not the simplest thing in the world.

Want to also add it's called CIDR notation - or that's what I've learned - and that term has loads of good results

> IPv6 is just as rare as IPv4

Well, it’s not? There are 2^64 /64 IPv6s compared to 2^32 IPv4s in total. Unless you meant to say a /64 is as expensive as an IPv4.

I think they mean rare in terms of usage? As in you are as unlikely to encounter an ipv6 address as compared to the amount of v6 addresses.

> The global dearth of available IP addresses has turned them into a commodity wherein each IP can fetch between $15-$25 on the open market.

So a whole class C is only $6,500? Or is there a bonus for a contiguous block?

Even so, my friend owns his own Class C (since 1994), and I doubt he would part with it for a mere $10,000.

RIRs only handle transfers of /24s or larger. I suppose it might be possible for a "legacy" pre-RIR address holder to reassign ownership rights of a single address, but I've never seen it happen for anything smaller than a /24. Even if it did happen, the addresses would be unusable on the Internet, since it's common practice to reject announcements of anything smaller than /24.

Your friend (correctly, IMO) values his address block more than the market does. They're regularly selling for $5000-6000 these days.

Insider jobs are unusually common in the non-private sector in developing markets. They also occur in the non-private sector in developed countries but not at the same scale.

The only "solution" in most of these developing countries is to have open and transparent auctions without onerous rules (another way of gaming the process) or to turn them into being private.

> the non-private sector

Aka the public sector. Or are there additional sectors that I am not aware of?

Weird NGOs that straddle the divide, think tanks, white collar unions aka "professional associations" that somehow acquired regulatory powers; see medicine, law, engineering, architecture etc. Corruption exists in all sorts of places.

You framed it perfectly! There are so many non-private sector institutions out there that I refrained from calling them even quasi public sector. In fact the example you mention of "professional associations" that have acquired regulatory powers is great as most of them are rife and riddled with corruption and act to either the benefit of their management or members and against the public interest.

I find this style of writing to be lazy and insulting.

“There are fewer than four billion so-called “Internet Protocol version 4” or IPv4 addresses...”

They aren’t “so called”. That’s literally the terminology.

Avoid reading the mainstream news then.

And there are (slightly) more than 4 billion of them, of course.

I'd guess they meant to exclude the ones that are invalid? Though I'm not sure how many of them there are.

The usage aligns with definition 1 ("commonly named") but not definition 2 ("falsely or improperly so named") at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called

I have never heard of the "commonly named" usage certainly in modern usage "so called" is always negative.

Fewer than 4 billion? pow(2, 32) is over 4 billion unless I’m missing something...

Some of the address space is reserved for particular purposes: 127.0.0.0/8 is for loopback, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16 for private addresses, 224.0.0.0/4 is for multicast, and 240.0.0.0/4 is class E and unallocatable for anything.

That it's the terminology people use would for me imply that people call it that, validating the phrase "so called".

Surely you mean 'so-called "style" of writing'? :)

Man, if only I kept a former employer's Class C who no longer exists.

It's 206.197.48.0/24 and needs to be culled and auctioned off.

I still have a Class C registered to me personally from way back in 1993.

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