What happens to ip blocks after they have been hijacked?
After an IP address block is hijacked, i.e. after somebody has effectively gained administrative control over the address range in the RIR records, the block is either sold (entirely) or leased (entirely or in parts) to other companies. These companies are often victims of deception and have no idea that the block they got is not theirs to hold and any transaction to get it had been illegal to start with. In many cases the blocks are also directly used by companies that hijacked them for their own other illegal activities. In either case, very often hijacked blocks end up in the hands of spammers (both those directly sending out unsolicited bulk email and those hosting web sites advertised by unsolicited bulk emails), porn-advertisers (who need a lot of IP addresses to fool search engines and to drive more traffic to their sites), shell-hosting providers (who need IP addresses for long weird reverse names used) so generally they are used for activities which otherwise not have been abl
