Krebs lost all of its credibility serving political agendas and not understanding teenagers nowadays! They should be ashamed of their ballless attempt at a character assassination!
Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#602All: 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…
I’m curious what the new and interesting information is. I read the article when it was originally posted a few days ago. I just scanned it again and it seems the same as before. Just curious. Thanks.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#603[dead]
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Krebs has written other articles about it: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/the-dark-nexus-between-h...
Yes and he’s literally just a journalist with no real cybersecurity background
Most journalists don't have a background in X when they are reporting upon X. This is normal. That said, he is very open that he does not have a cybersecurity background (trained engineer), but he does rely heavily upon a network of experts. Again, a reporter working on a story about geopolitics is unlikely to have past experience as a high ranking gov't official in state dept/foreign ministry, but will rely heavily upon a network of experts. Do you have any specific concerns about this?
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#605I find it shockingly absurd how the All-In podcast hosts blindly support everything one of their own does. It’s obvious they treat Musk like a god. In the latest episode, they even made fun of concerns about privacy, claiming that all people care about is the state not wasting money. - completely dismissing worries about data exposure.
To be fair, musk is a pretty outrageously successful and interesting person. I’ve seen very little criticism of him that isn’t thinly veiled jealousy
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#606I find it shockingly absurd how the All-In podcast hosts blindly support everything one of their own does. It’s obvious they treat Musk like a god. In the latest episode, they even made fun of concerns about privacy, claiming that all people care about is the state not wasting money. - completely dismissing worries about data exposure.
> all people care about is the state not wasting money. - completely dismissing worries about data exposure
A tangent here, but: Gas taxes paying for roads. There is a relationship between inefficiency and privacy.
I often encounter some libertarian-types complaining about this, that they should only be taxed for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure they personally drive upon. Indirect benefits aside, I try to point out that the billing-system they're asking for requires a creepy surveillance panopticon, something far more ripe for abuse than any gas tax.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#607It has been a fairly common story, and part rumor, that intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the cyber criminal scene, and that the IT security industry also adapted this approach. They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities. When I studied IT security in university, about 1…
I see you are mixing up IT security jobs where you can hire „mischievous people” with IT admins. I say 90% of security is admin work where one has access to various stuff. Then you have red teams, pentesters, consultants- that don’t have ever privileged access to anything. They should find flaws and pass recommendations to IT admins. If they hack anything at all - it has to be outlined in scope and strictly monitored…
I think you would be a bit surprised with both the university programs that teach it security, and also which companies that look to employ them.
IT security can be admins, it can be programmers that focus on exploit vunerbilities, it can be reverse engineers, it can be pentesters, it can be red teams, and it can be people with high domain knowledge in a very narrow field related to security. IT security is a very wide field.
IT security programs focuses a bit on everything, but as in my university, they gave the person responsible for the program a fairly free range to focus on what they thought was what the market wanted. Different universities will focus on different aspects.
The organizations that seek such employees are also quite wide. The military, the intelligence agency, large software companies, large companies with internet assets (like banks, but also game studios), government departments like the tax office, and then naturally we got all kind of IT security firms with red teams, pentesters, consultants and so on. A big hire of my class was also a network company developing network finger rules for deep packet inspections, which wanted people skilled with reverse engineering and decompiling (they may or may not have employed people who had experience cracking games).
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Com is just a general term for crime communities on the Internet. Its not a specific group. The Com includes groups that commit crimes stretching from cybercrime to literally the worst crimes you can think of and the vast majority of this is done on Discord and Telegram. You can go down a really dark rabbit hole if you really dig deep into some of these groups within The Com. This is where the worst of the worst…
So is "The Com" an actual distinct concept that exists outside of security blogs, or is it more or less the same as "the scene" is used in other communities—just a generic term for all the unaffiliated people who happen to participate in a particular (in this case nefarious) hobby? The way Krebs uses this first makes it sound like The Com is the name of a specific gang, but when I dig into the details the definition…
It's distinct in that these groups aren't isolated from each other, there's member overlap and subgroups splintering from each other due to trying to avoid authorities.
It's also distinct in the type of crimes. Sextortion involving young kids/creation and sharing of CSAM merging with extreme political beliefs and encouraging those beliefs, with a specific focus to target young kids particularly those vulnerable enough to not have parents immediately notice. The criminals are often also on the younger side, like 19 year olds leading sex cults[1].
"The Com" goes by other names due to these groups being in a lot of different regions under different monikers and subgroups. 764 network, cvlt network, harm nation, etc. All the same general type of crime and target groups.
Here's some resources warning people about them:
https://rcmp.ca/en/news/2024/08/rcmp-reminds-canadians-about...
https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
[1] https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/sextortion-coms-inside-a-vile...
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#609Many former hackers have been hired by the government with TS clearances and it's ridiculous to compare teenage hacker groups to violent street gangs. I told an agency of previous hacking stuff and they were more concerned with me admitting to cheating on a math test at college lol.
yeah they're vetted, get clearance, and are on a short leash... none of that seems to apply here
Citation? They're not monitored or anything closer than normal cleared people.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Com is just a general term for crime communities on the Internet. Its not a specific group. The Com includes groups that commit crimes stretching from cybercrime to literally the worst crimes you can think of and the vast majority of this is done on Discord and Telegram. You can go down a really dark rabbit hole if you really dig deep into some of these groups within The Com. This is where the worst of the worst…
To what degree is this common knowledge? After 20 years of being highly online I'm surprised to be so blindsided. Not that I work in security or anything.
I suspect it's because it's a label put onto the workhorse of modern crime syndicates, not a vanity title like a gangs have. It's a web of disparate barely connected mercenary dots, so I imagine most people in "The Com" don't actually realise it's a phenomenon that has been named, and that they are a part of it.