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DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#211

Post by frank_nitti »

rideontime wrote: post #65
nop_slide wrote: post #46

I find the following bizarre. Ignoring who this marko guy is, why would a random person post such a "take down" of the repo? I have never randomly passed by a repo and wanted to just dunk on it. Also this critique reeks of being AI generated. > On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundament…

It's only "bizarre" if you "ignore who this marko guy is." It's not a coincidence, it's somebody pointing out that DOGE's "cracked coders" are wearing no clothes.

And the follies here seem to be many. I’m not following why this Marko guy would make a publicly-visible fork of a repo (though he seems to have deleted it since this story went big), and why they would openly request to have their accounts exempted from logging when they were apparently already privileged users.

I must be missing something here; surely the level of elite technical skill implicit in his résumé would preclude this kind of thing

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#212

Post by marcusb »

alright2565 wrote: post #190
whalesalad wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did. It's essentially just a single .py file: https://gist.github.com/whalesalad/06804fd734efe6bd2e0c84906...

x_forwarded_for = headers.get("X-Forwarded-For") if x_forwarded_for is None: x_forwarded_for = ipaddress.IPv4Address._string_from_ip_int( randint(0, MAX_IPV4) ) lol

The original author claims this is to prevent API gateway from leaking the true client IP.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#214

Post by pesus »

cpursley wrote: post #213
pesus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an actual rebuttal to the data?

[flagged]

Do you have any evidence or analysis of this beyond your comment calling it fake? Do you honestly believe getting rid of disease prevention and treatment for children will not result in a single death? Do you have any evidence it was a "slush fund" and not actually being used for disease prevention and treatment? Do you honestly believe that people upset over children dying are lying, and instead are all upset that they are no longer able to access a supposed "slush fund"?

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#215

Post by rtkwe »

twalkz wrote: post #8

> According to a whistleblower complaint filed last week by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB, officials from DOGE met with NLRB leaders on March 3 and demanded the creation of several all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts. Feels like a pretty good Occa…

Even worse when you know more of the whistleblower's story which is that ~15 minutes after one of DOGE's accounts were made there was an attempted login with the correct password from Russia. Not many explanations for that that look good for DOGE...

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#216

Post by [deleted] »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #114
progbits wrote: post #45

> Ge0rg3’s code is “open source,” in that anyone can copy it and reuse it non-commercially. As it happens, there is a newer version of this project that was derived or “forked” from Ge0rg3’s code — called “async-ip-rotator” — and it was committed to GitHub in January 2025 by DOGE captain Marko Elez. Original code: https://github.com/Ge0rg3/requests-ip-rotator Forked: https://github.com/markoelez/async-ip-rotator Code…

FYI the Fork got hidden/deleted in the last minute or so -- did anyone manage to clone it before it disappeared?

[deleted]

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#219

Post by acdha »

michaelt wrote: post #210
pan69 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity Is this normal to build this sort of functionality into a software system? Especially software systems that heavily rely on auditability?

Sometimes, depending on the situation. My company retains all e-mails for at least 5 years, for audit purposes. But if some troublemaker were to e-mail child porn to an employee, we'd need to remove that from the audit records, because the laws against possessing child porn don't have an exception for corporate audit records. So there's essentially always some account with the power to erase things from the audit rec…

Very true - this comes up constantly in blockchain questions - but in that case there’d at least be an audit log showing who deleted which records.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#220

Post by xorcist »

jiggawatts wrote: post #58

This is much ado about nothing. The article tries to very hard to make something ordinary sound nefarious. This appears to be DOGE employees simply doing their job. You may not agree with what they’re doing in a political sense, but if you were tasked with the same problem you’d come up with a nearly identical solution. For example: “tenant admin” is probably the special role that can bypass access control (not audit…

I have taken part in audits for several organizations over the years, and I can assure you that's not how audits are done at all.

In fact, should the auditor find there is a way for them to access sensitive data without it being logged, they will flag it immediately. That would be the case even under simple financial regulation.

There is absolutely the risk that the people you audit will lie to you or present you with false data. In practice that's not common, because they stand to at the very least lose their jobs. It could also be illegal. Not worth it.

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