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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#391

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

alecco wrote: post #281
fabian2k wrote: post #47

Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly what was copied and where it is stored. This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of…

Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen 's own? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h... ( https://archive.ph/xeEaO ) (January 16, 2025)

I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle. There was also no outrage about various security breaches that exposed personal information for 100 million Americans, like the Change Healthcare breach. The reaction to alleged violation of privacy here seems inconsistent and disproportionate, and I wonder why?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#392

Post by demosthanos »

brandonagr2 wrote: post #355
apical_dendrite wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't even line up with what Elon is saying publicly. Mike Flynn searches a public database for grants to organizations with the word "Lutheran" in them and then Elon tweets that they're all illegal and will be canceled. How is that a thoughtful process for identifying wasteful spending? Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves…

[flagged]

> in 25 states

Will the program advance into other states after the dissolution of the organization that created it? Will it be kept up to date? Or will it quietly disappear in the name of efficiency?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#393

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #391
alecco wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen 's own? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h... ( https://archive.ph/xeEaO ) (January 16, 2025)

I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle. There was also no outrage about various security breaches that exposed personal information for 100 million Americans , like the Change Healthcare breach. The reaction to alleged violation of privacy here seems inconsistent and disproportionate, and I wonder why?

The story did get memoryholed very fast. At the time, I was not sure what to ascribe it to ( well, still don't ), but I did find it interesting that it was pointed out how limited in scope it was.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#394

Post by keyme »

aranw wrote: post #381
swat535 wrote: post #356

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here: 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a hu…

I don't really understand how this is an audit? Shutting down departments, getting root access to systems, read/write access to codebases these are hardly the actions of auditors doing a audit. Does a audit really require this level of access?

This is an audit that is actually meant to get results

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#395

Post by ebcode »

dang wrote: post #684
dang wrote: post #37

All: if you're going to comment here, please make sure you're up on the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , and don't post low-information / high-indignation comments that could just as easily appear in any related thread. Such generic comments make discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here. Rather, we want curious conversation. I know that's n…

I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea. This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org…

Thank you, dang. I think you've done the right thing here, and I'm sure you're also under a lot of stress right now. Thanks for having faith in the community to discuss this amicably.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#396

Post by mijamo »

swat535 wrote: post #356

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here: 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a hu…

There are way more possibilities. And the main one is that any negative effect would only be visible in a long time (let's say 10 years) and by that time it may take 10-20 years again to change course.

For instance say you lower standards for building bridges, how do you assess the success? First you may notice nothing, because all bridges under construction stay with their design, so consequence 0. After a few years, construction costs may go down because the new standard allow to cut some corners. Great! Success! Now 30 years in the future maybe suddenly the bridge has a failure that costs 20x the savings at the time of construction. Well suddenly not great. But changing the standard at that point would not fix all the bridges built over those 30 years.

Evaluating public policies is often very hard and it's sometimes only possible a long time after. I would also say that weather or not a policy is good or has positive impact has little impact on winning or losing elections. Lots of terrible policies can win you voters. Just like building the best product is not the easiest way to make money. For both goods and elections, playing on emotions works a lot better.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#397

Post by palata »

swat535 wrote: post #356

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here: 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a hu…

You seem pretty optimistic. A plausible alternative is that it really ends up hurting the US.

In some way, it has started hurting the US. Ask anyone in the world who is not a US citizen if they think the US is stable. I think the answer has changed a lot in, say, the last 10 years.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#398

Post by vharuck »

timewizard wrote: post #279
9283409232 wrote: post #106

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

The question no one is asking is why does the federal government have so much "sensitive data" on it's citizens in the first place? When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT. Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwa…

The NIH and CDC have incredibly detailed medical event data for infectious diseases, cancer diagnoses, and death certificates (which have a ton of data beyond "John Doe of New York City died of such and such on such and such date." It's how we have incredibly effective epidemiologists. Hospitals and non-profits use the data published by the government to make large decisions about equipment purchases, types of staff to hire, and community health programs to run.

All the government professionals I've met who work with that data are very careful with it. The guiding star is "Never let anyone use our data to find out something about any individual. Then, if you still can, publish someone useful."

>Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.

They only had to get security clearances and follow the Constitution. Clearances are routine, so shouldn't be a problem (unless the person being cleared is a problem). The Republicans control all branches of government, and cost-cutting is very popular among all voters, so writing a better budget is possible. Things won't collapse if they work on it until before the midterm elections. It just seems like Trump is testing how far he can walk along the path to tyranny.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#399

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

ineptech wrote: post #94
fabian2k wrote: post #47

Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly what was copied and where it is stored. This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of…

What's more worrying is whether the access can realistically be revoked. As a general rule, when a security even rises to the level of root access to internal systems, you don't even try to remove them - you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch because it's the only way to be sure the attacker didn't leave anything behind. For the systems we're talking about, payment processing stuff at Treasury and Social Secu…

I will admit I did not think of that aspect of it. I think the reason I didn't is because, supposedly - as it was presented to me at the time, those systems run on some ancient hardware/software. In other words, even if something was left behind, it shouldn't be that hard to locate.

If anyone with real experience in that area could chime in. Until now I was under impression COBOL ran it all:P

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#400

Post by bad_username »

juujian wrote: post #390
bad_username wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems Before DOGE, somebody obviously had to have this access as well, and similarly could have copied and stored. Why be concerned with DOGE but not their predecessors? Honest question.

Process for security clearance might have caught this kids background, and then decision makers would have at least had a conversation about it. This kid is more a symptom of a wider lack of controls though, who knows whether any of Musk's script kiddies has a criminal background. Important to note that previous Trump administration has already followed out/bypassed security clearance process, so this is really just…

You say there's security clearance which was a prerequisite for the predecessors but was bypassed by the DOGE team. Understood.
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