[xwolfi]

Reading what the DOD said "officially" it appears that maybe they were just looking to see if these IP could be registered, simply.

It sounds a bit weird they would have needed 170+M ips to get a good attack sample from the internet if the ip are contiguous, a few thousands would have sufficed. It sounds very weird to expect "China" to suddenly route Xi's dirty videos and why not Iran, Japan, everyone suddenly routing craps there, it's not very targetted and would cost quite a bit to read all the potential tcp packets that got lost by bad WAN vs LAN priority decisions in routers.

Also, it's one shot, so why now ? They would have just lost a huge weapon, if true, in a very public manner, for no particular visible threat, not precise target and at great cost possibly.

I'm okay to believe this was possibly just an inventory/activation exercise because someone noticed they owned stuff they can't use until they register them.