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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'

#371

Post by bigiain »

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 just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch

These people have administrative access, and at least in some cases network and physical access.

Once you determine they are untrustworthy and potentially malicious, you can't just rebuild the VMs, since you can no longer trust the hypervisor or even the hardware.

If they were Chinese or Mossad agents, you'd start from scratch in a different DC on supply chain audited new compute, storage, and networking hardware. And you'd compile everything from audited source. And I have NFI how you'd deal with potential malicious changes to your data and backups.

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

#372

Post by donmcronald »

belorn wrote: post #114

It 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…

> 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.

I don't think the argument they can act as an informer for things going on inside government agencies works. They've never been on the inside.

And I don't see what it has to do with IT security. What are they doing that's security related? Isn't what they're claiming to be doing pretty much data analysis?

The only overlapping skill I can see is a willingness to exfiltrate data, if they're doing that, without giving consideration to the rules or consequences.

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

#373

Post by fragmede »

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…

Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again, reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people. hacking. That's not of interest on hacker news? If, then, the subject without the political angle, would have been of interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious topic on top of that, make it of less interest to the community?

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

#374

Post by jenny91 »

Kinrany wrote: post #351
lenerdenator wrote: post #265

All I can think of when I hear about DOGE is Robert McNamara's Department of Defense, where the "Whiz Kids" from industry and academia were supposed to magically fix all sorts of problems with the military's bureaucracy. After all, they went to the right schools, and really, how hard could war-making be? We lost in Vietnam and there are people being born there with birth defects from Operation Ranch Hand to this day…

> After all, they went to the right school The selection process here appears to have been the opposite of traditional credentialism

It's a new spin on an old idea. Software whiz kids are what a part of society now see as the cream of the crop.

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

#375

Post by daveguy »

swat535 wrote: post #356

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here: 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a hu…

You left out this possibility:

A critical subversion of cybersecurity in the United States that leads to decades of compromised computer systems throughout our society -- from infrastructure to military to banking. I heard someone refer to this as a speedrun of the fall of the roman empire, and given the lack of ethics at the top levels of this administration I wouldn't be surprised.

"giving the DNC a huge attack vector..." -- I think you're mistaking an attack vector for a realization that this regime is incompetent and against the safety and security of the United States population.

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

#376

Post by [deleted] »

fsckboy wrote: post #333
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…

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

[deleted]

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

#377

Post by arp242 »

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…

Also after Musk took over my DMs were full of bots (never had a bot DM me before that). And the platform is drenched in outright naked racism and antisemitism in a way it wasn't before because they just decided you don't really need to do anything with that (except if someone says "cisgender", of course).

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

#378

Post by matwood »

swat535 wrote: post #356

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here: 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a hu…

I'm thinking 2/3, but the part you're missing is that the process will destroy US influence around the world. Which may be the real point of all this. It's hard to know where Musk's allegiances really lie.

With that said, the US has been in the dominant world position for so long, it's like they forget what it takes to be there. Soft power, by giving people food and support - like USAID does, is part of what helps keep the US in that dominant position.

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

#379

Post by dang »

fsckboy wrote: post #333
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…

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

Normally we turn off replies on pinned comments to avoid this problem, but today I decided to leave it open, to give people a chance to air their objections/counterarguments/feelings and hopefully get responded to.

However, to avoid the thread ballooning at the top of the page, I'm also detaching these subthreads as I reply to them.

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

#380

Post by dang »

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…

This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about politics are off topic, as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but some stories with political overlap are on topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

Here are a couple recent posts to look at if you (or anyone) want to understand the principles by which we decide which ones get to count as "on topic":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you read those and follow the links there, and still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

> What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people complain?

I made precisely the same point a few minutes ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906

The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.

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