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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'

#401

Post by nailer »

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…

You should leave the flags, for the same reasons as last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933391

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

#402

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

mmastrac wrote: post #236

The reason security clearances are so important, and why people are so upset about randos going through so much sensitive government information, is that things like this can be used by adversaries to lean on these employees in the future. One of these kids might have worse skeletons in their closet. Given how well-known their names are, adversaries of the USA are likely combing through their own intelligence archive…

To be clear, the security clearances you’re talking about, that look at “skeletons in their closet” or family members or whatever is not applied to MOST federal positions. This is only for a subset that are more sensitive. The type of activity people involved in DOGE are taking on does not require security clearances, just a background check. Also keep in mind, the people involved in DOGE are working alongside senior people, alongside people from agencies, and not just off on their own the way the media has been painting. Treasury secretary Bessent discussed this recently in public.

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

#403

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #97
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…

The amount of commercially and politically valuable information there is in these systems is incredible. If these people are scooping up this information you can imagine they might be tempted to monetize or weaponize it at some point, or use the threat of such for their own gain. This is absolutely chilling when you think about it.

On the other hand, we may all experience privacy at levels uncomfortable for a lot of people, which MIGHT trigger some desire to actually make things more privacy conscious.

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

#404

Post by nailer »

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?

Data scientists are generally better than financial auditors at handling large quantities of data.

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

#405

Post by try_the_bass »

trickyager wrote: post #133
engineer_22 wrote: post #110

The stakes are high for these kids. They're obviously very talented individuals, but they're in deep. The reality probably isn't lost on them. I hope they stay safe, they're doing important work.

Are they, though? I'm not trying to be flippant. Rather, it's entirely unclear to me any positive outcome for these individuals or American citizen in general as a result of this effort. Can you provide vetted sources that accurately communciate actual benefits as a result of this effory for anyone other than Elon Musk and Donald Trump as individuals?

> Can you provide vetted sources that accurately communciate actual benefits as a result of this effory for anyone other than Elon Musk and Donald Trump as individuals?

Can you provide such sources that communicate the benefits of this effort for only Elon Musk and Donald Trump? I have seen a lot of speculation on the matter, with much of it plausible, but nothing concrete and nothing that really stands up to intense scrutiny.

At this point we're all working on a near-total information vacuum. To claim you know anything with certainty is presumptive, at best. To claim, with anything short of first-hand knowledge, that you both know exactly what is happening and exactly why it is happening is unbelievable.

Or at least it should be, but as discussion around this topic indicates, it's actually quite believable. Which is really a shame.

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

#406

Post by dashundchen »

vimy wrote: post #231
bearjaws wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is. To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration. She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later th…

Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency. From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations. Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46

Orders can be given that are unconstitutional or unlawful. Congress appropriates and designates funds, it is illegal for the executive to impound funds Congress appropriate. Unfortunately the GOP is happy to hand over their power in Congress and walk right into a dictatorship.

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

#407

Post by apical_dendrite »

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]

Any confusion here is on Elon.

He was responding to a tweet that featured a screenshot from the IRS website about Direct File. The tweet said "18F, the far left government wide computer office that was recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax program. Direct File puts the government in charge of preparing people's tax returns for them". To which Musk responded "That group has been deleted".

If you google "Elon musk free file" you'll see dozens of articles with headlines like "Elon Musk creates confusion about IRS' Direct File".

It's unclear to me what the impact of "deleting" the group that built that product is. It's unclear whether Elon wants to delete that product and not just the team that built it, and given that they are suddenly shutting down whole agencies without regard for the fallout, it's unclear whether he will get rid of it.

It's a hell of a way to run a government.

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

#408

Post by kolanos »

bearjaws wrote: post #214
jdross wrote: post #185

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…

If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is. To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration. She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later th…

> non-profit immigration

Very vague. Wonder what they were really doing?

I worked for a USAID funded company once. On the surface they were doing satellite imagery analysis for agriculture. Want to know what they were really doing? Identifying prime agricultural land in Kenya to help the Kenyan government seize it from poor farmers.

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

#409

Post by Fauntleroy »

jdross wrote: post #185

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…

Maybe you could point some of the media to these primary sources you're citing.

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

#410

Post by _kb »

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…

You don’t just rebuild the VMs. You burn the DC and start again from scratch. That’s exactly what Cloudflare had to do: https://blog.cloudflare.com/thanksgiving-2023-security-incid...
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