This is how Internet resources worth R800 million were stolen and sold on the black market

Bradley Prior

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This is how Internet resources worth R800 million were stolen and sold on the black market

The theft and sale of large swaths of valuable African Internet resources was an inside job, Internet investigator Ron Guilmette has concluded after five months of detective work.

Documents obtained from industry sources and public records in Uganda show that at least one insider at AFRINIC is also a shareholder of a company that received money for selling IP addresses.
 
So Jan could have lead with his usual, "Massive amounts of IP space stolen by the aliens and the sky is falling"
This article is well researched and I have to give it to Jan and the team.
Fact is there is MASSIVE amounts of demand for IPv4 space and networks/companies will pay the price for what it is worth for their businesses.
Africa, yet again, is the last frontier and still has IPv4 space available unlike APNIC, APRICOT and all the other regions,
The world doesnt care for all this IPv4 stuff.. it is only the people operating businesses that care if they can stay in business and make money.
This simply shows that if we all move to IPv6 this would not be an issue and sensualist journalists will be out of a job.
Easier said than done.
Keep Calm and deploy IPv6 :)
 
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Brian Krebs has published an article about this. He helped with the earlier part of our investigation to get comment from DXC Technology. DXC told him that they believe, through various mergers and acquisitions, that they are the rightful owners of a block of IPs registered to AECI. His early work on this story helped confirm that the anomalies Guilmette saw in the AFRINIC WHOIS database were indeed what they appeared --- wholesale theft of African IP resources.

For his report, Krebs looked into what some of the stolen addresses were used for. Happy reading:

 
@Jan You is famous sir! Getting a mention on Krebs is a pretty big deal.

However, he abruptly resigned from his position in October 2019 shortly after news of the IP address scheme was first detailed by Jan Vermeulen, a reporter for the South African tech news publication Mybroadband.co.za who assisted Guilmette in his research.

But well fscking done dude, this is epic reporting and a great story and follow through.
 
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