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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'

#331

Post by ganoushoreilly »

tbatchelli wrote: post #146
amazingamazing wrote: post #61

The biggest irony to me is that Musk wanted to reneg on the Twitter sale. It's interesting to consider the timeline where he was allowed to not buy it. Truly a "canon" event, that one. I'm also not convinced this is a "security breach." They're being allowed to do it. It's more like an unforced error, if anything. Not that it changes anything material about the situation. That said - a small majority of congress is c…

> I'm also not convinced this is a "security breach." They're being allowed to do it. It's more like an unforced error, if anything. Not that it changes anything material about the situation. From the perspective of the owners of this data, the US citizens and others that live in the country, this is very much a security breach; the data that was supposed to be secure is no longer secure.

I would argue that the same could be said that "from the perspective of the owners of this data, the US citizens and others that live in the country" it's evident that the government has been recklessly spending money. The reality is Americans voted this in, they wanted it. Both sides have made historical voting points for claiming to clean up corruption and cut the fat, none of them really did. This time it's being cut for everyone to see. They don't like it. People will fight it. Some good programs will be impacted. Once the dust settles we'll fix it, but for now I have yet to see any good arguments for some of the excess spending programs. I've seen little or no justification for billions going to foreign countries while Americans are in need of help.

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

#332

Post by blondie9x »

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)

That's a bit different than complete access to the complete payments database isn't it?

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

#333

Post by fsckboy »

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…

a ton of replies to dang's adminsitraviata comment are highjacking his "sticky" to coattail all their comments to the top, and the comments are generally right on the edge of being what dang's comment is trying to warn against.

I'd flag them all but fear that would appear heavy handed

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

#334

Post by watwut »

braza wrote: post #284
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?

> team of teenage Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults). I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern wor…

I would trust 19 years old soldier with an assault weapon more then trusting him with what DOGE is supposed to do. Soldiers passed training literally designed to make them obey orders and not randomly shoot that gun. And there is whole hierarchy designed to keep their use of assault guns in check.

I would not trust a random 19 years old with assault gun, I would not trust that guy if we were alone in the room where his superiors do not see. But, I would be afraid of him raping me more then him using that gun without order.

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

#335

Post by mmastrac »

adolph wrote: post #324
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…

> Or, even more horrible, they might have family that adversaries can lean on. Isn't that the case for any government employee?

Security clearance will include family members, and it's entirely possible someone will be denied clearance because of something they've done that makes them susceptible to coercion. The candidate would need to disclose things like this.

Reddit is full of examples where someone's family impacted their clearance (either denying it or requiring disclosure):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/4d4xd8/possib...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/11pkjew/will_a_f...

etc

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

#336

Post by atoav »

milesrout wrote: post #294
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…

I don't see how this kind of story is on-topic for HN. Yes, we all appreciate that HN is more than just a website for discussing garbage collection algorithms, graph algorithms, javascript frameworks, etc (i.e. computer science and programming) but isn't it meant to be about things that hackers would find interesting by virtue of being hackers ? My understanding of that broader topicality was that it was intended to…

I don't see how this isn't hacker news: "What is the technical education of the teenager with security clearance to the network of the org that is responsible for nukes"

That sounds *literallyf like the plot for any 80s hacker movie out there. You know, when hacking was political and hackers were people interested in undermining structures of authority and bending the rules.

That is the origin of hacking, and as such it is totally in order to discuss such topics here, IMO.

I'd rather read stuff like this than another CEOs musings that are entirely marketing and make believe (cue Sam Altman). Just because it affirms billionairs viewpoints of the status quo doesn't make it apolitical. If it feels apolitical to you that probably says something about your political biases.

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

#337

Post by jokethrowaway »

mvdtnz wrote: post #289
timewizard wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How could the US government do things like collect tax or regulate the medical industry without sensitive data?

I'd be happy if they dropped both taxes and regulations

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

#338

Post by pityJuke »

SamBam wrote: post #24

Is it the same Edward Big Baller that tweeted that Elon stole the election and is setting up more computers within the government to be hacked? https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr...

No, this is clearly not the same guy.

This is just someone who took Coristine's previous handle [0]. That post was made 1 day after the WIRED article revealing his handle. Lots of conspiracies around election stealing going round (and sadly, quite prevalent in some corners of Bluesky), don't fall for it!

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/edward-coristine-tesla-sexy-path... - "He also *previously* used an account on X with the username @edwardbigballer"

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

#339

Post by jsiepkes »

billfor wrote: post #321
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?

[flagged]

> He cofounded paypal which is payment system. Presumably he knows about things like payment systems, fraud, etc...

No, he didn't. He founded x.com as a payment system which was substantially less popular then paypal. Due to a bunch of mergers of parent companies, x.com and paypal had to merge. Musk became CEO and the whole thing was later sold to ebay, he left and cashed out big. That whole timeline unfolded in just a couple of years.

So his actual experience is not that long. And besides that all unfolded in 1999. I have no idea what your age is but that was a different time and payment system knowledge from that time isn't worth that much nowadays.

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

#340

Post by Everdred2dx »

snowwrestler wrote: post #124
retskrad wrote: post #75

When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still ran like usual, people said the he’s a moron and the service couldn’t possibly run without a bloated and inefficient workforce. They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to all of his companies and now the federal government, people are once again saying he doesn’t know what he’…

Just want to point out that Twitter is not running anything like it used to. It’s handling orders of magnitude less load because they have broken all publicly embedded tweets, blocked public searching of tweets, blocked public browsing of tweets, and cut off all API access except for a very few who are paying. Brand safety is also essentially turned off. This was a staff-intensive feature because brands can’t delete…

This was a very insightful comment. Cheers!
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