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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'

#231

Post by vimy »

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…

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

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

#232

Post by tonymet »

fujinghg wrote: post #218

I used to hang around with the late 90s's versions of these guys. I grew up, had a family, have had a successful career. They went to prison. I expect the same will happen to this lot.

Almost all the top tier infosec professionals had a grey-hat history. The successful ones are not likely cringe posting on LinkedIn so you wouldn’t have any idea of the successes, only the failures.

Of course we all want to say : see, obedience and hard work pays off. I’m glad I didn’t do anything reckless. The truth is that the real successful people keep it to themselves.

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

#233

Post by 9283409232 »

93po wrote: post #204
9283409232 wrote: post #79

Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them walk in and have access? Tell them to kick rocks until they have proper clearances.

Why do we care so much about classified information? Why is there a reverence for our government hiding information from its people? Why shouldn't the government operate out in the open in all ways? Something something terrorism, but i don't buy it. terrorism is the scapegoat for which we have massively eroded privacy and rights, in the same way that CSAM is the scapegoat for trying to ban encryption every 5 years.

They don't just have classified information. There is a lot of sensitive personal information on you and me in these databases. Information that can be used for blackmail and other nefarious purposes.

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

#234

Post by rich_sasha »

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?

Moving fast and breaking things.

Though I note at SpaceX he seems to hire actual rocket scientists.

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

#235

Post by PenguinCoder »

kjrfghslkdjfl wrote: post #179
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?

Answer is obvious. Because teenagers tend to be impressionable and unscrupulous.

And typically cheaper to employ.

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

#236

Post by mmastrac »

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 archives, etc and might decide to extract their own pound of flesh from the government.

Or, even more horrible, they might have family that adversaries can lean on.

Subverting the process to meme faster and blitz the other side puts the entire American system in pretty serious danger. If it's more important to destroy the system than make serious change, I suppose that's how you'd do it.

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

#237

Post by Quarrelsome »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-related thread. Such generic comments make the discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here. We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supp…

its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming. Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential cybersecurity risks to government data please.

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

#238

Post by Waterluvian »

Of all the ways for China, Russia, Iran, Israel, etc. to get access to sensitive data like this, these events feel like they’re by a wide margin the most likely way for them to do so.

These people are going to cut corners and be sloppy and stuff is just going to end up on USB keys and whatnot.

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

#239

Post by gamblor956 »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #140

I don't like Musk and have not for many years, but the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time. It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others. Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections. I remember when Ron Desantis was successfully undermined by the news media casting him as…

the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time. It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others.

Name one.

Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections....The left celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be easier to beat.

This was not true in 2016 or in 2024. Dems preferred Cruz as an opponent in 2016 because he was the one candidate even more disliked than Hilary. In 2024, DeSantis was undermined by Fox News and News Nation...at Trump's urging). Trump was already ahead of Biden in the polls dating back to summer 2023; Democratic leadership would have preferred DeSantis as an opponent because he was extremely disliked even by Republicans outside of Florida (one can't claim the mantle of "family friendly" and "business friendly" when they go to war with Disney, the largest employer in their state) and they would have at least had a shot to retain the presidency.

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

#240

Post by TheRealNGenius »

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…

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