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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'

#631

Post by Fnoord »

zeroCalories wrote: post #505
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…

Don't know about intellegence agencies but I got to know pentesters / red teamers at some large companiese, and they were cool but had a very unsavory side. Several times I found myself in conversations where they were admiting to serious crimes and unethical behavior. I suspect that you need to be passionate about wanting to do bad things if you want to be good at security.

Stories from their young years or recent? Bragging or back when it occurred a sign of skill? There's nuances to be found here.

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

#632

Post by nerdponx »

DannyBee wrote: post #616
n1b0m wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in this case they’ll probably get sweeping presidential pardons

Won't save them from state prosecution, and it seems there is plenty to dig into here. For the types of crime Krebs is talking about, it's really easy to get charged in lots of states with lots of things, and the statute of limitations are fairly long depending on the crime. Often the feds charge you first, but clearly not gonna happen here. They seem too young and stupid to realize ahead of time how far people will…

The current president is pushing constitutional boundaries everywhere. I expect that we will see a big test of federal versus state authority soon.

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

#633

Post by efitz »

adamwintle wrote: post #627
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #510

I 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.

“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor,” — a close associate of Musk’s

Unattributed hearsay is not useful in any rational debate. It is effectively just veiled ad hominem.

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

#634

Post by throwaway2037 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #391
alecco wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle. There was also no outrage about various security breaches that exposed personal information for 100 million Americans , like the Change Healthcare breach. The reaction to alleged violation of privacy here seems inconsistent and disproportionate, and I wonder why?

What was the impact of the "exposed personal information" from Change Healthcare? One thing that makes me suspicious when I see those leaked personal details headlines: I am sure that my own personal info has been leaked many, many times. And, yet, never once have I been hacked (PC/laptop/phone) or had financial crimes against me (steal credit card, unauth'd charges, etc.). And, I write this as a total normie, who basically depends upon Google Accounts/Passwords to "do it all for me" (and my commercial banks where I have bank + credit cards). I don't do anything particularly special.

To be clear: I am not here to defend companies with weak cybersecurity, but the impact of these leaks is virtually nil. "One hundred million" sounds like a huge number, but it provides little insight on the realised impacts.

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

#635

Post by tjpnz »

p3rls wrote: post #490
culi wrote: post #454

> the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration To be honest, this is my first time hearing about The Com. Does anyone have any more reading on this? You'd think they'd use something more secure than Discord (which has 0 encryption) and Telegram which doesn'…

When I was a teen these types hung out on IRC and even AOL in chatrooms like "progs" to trade credit card numbers. Young people and operational security doesn't exist.

>Young people and operational security doesn't exist.

If I had PII in the systems they have access to I would be concerned. How long until someone gets spear phished or malware is installed on their presumably non-compliant systems? There's a reason why big corps spend significantly on security training for new grads.

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

#636

Post by Psillisp »

b8 wrote: post #469
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…

Well, I mean China already pwned opm.gov and got SF-86 on all fed employees a few years ago. The FBI gives people who have clearances on how adversaries will attempt to get information and what to do. Mainly it's just alerting the employers security office, and former feds get an email to reach out to for questions/concerns post employment. The security clearance process is broken and mostly BS. The head of DCSA and…

[flagged]

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

#637

Post by ameister14 »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #538
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…

> yet-another interchangeable flamewar You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar". What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.

I tend to disagree, in terms of coordinated upheaval we saw something similar in Andrew Jackson's presidency. Nothing new under the sun, I'm afraid.

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

#638

Post by qaq »

wavefunction wrote: post #595
qaq wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People mentioned Elon's DOGE team is about 200 people including lawyers and accountants. I am guessing the focus on the 6 youngsters is mainly because here's a bunch of former Deloitte lawyers/accountants is not a newsworthy thing to focus on especially if your angle is to discredit the effort.

You're telling me 200 ALLEGED adult professionals are involved in a scheme where some 19 year old cybercriminal has access to classified nuclear weapons systems as if that's any indication of a better situation than critics allege and you think you've got sober and thoughtful take to offer on this situation, do you?

I didn't know FED data that was accessed at the Treasury department contained data on classified nuclear weapons systems. I've also never seen this level of freakout over real breaches like say SolarWind done by APT-29(Cozy Bear) actual Russian foreign intelligence group. That breach included Treasury, DoD, DoJ, State Department, DHS, Energy Department and so on.

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

#639

Post by cycomanic »

Dalewyn wrote: post #623
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #510

I 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.

[flagged]

The irony with these arguments is that the reason for the large debt is that every time the republicans have been in power they have been cutting income by slashing taxes fro the rich, while at the same time spending big on wars etc.. They then slash funding for all programs they don't like, no matter how little dent they make into the overall budget.

Let's be real if they would be worried about government spending they would start at usaid or the CDC (usaid corresponds to 1.2% of the total budget, not a significant portion of the budget by any measure).

Debt vs president:

https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...

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