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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'

#891

Post by lmeyerov »

sandworm101 wrote: post #790
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…

Those kids make good "experts" in thier narrow fields, but that doesnt last long. They are generally not effective leaders, thier usefullness drying up as the state of the art moves on. Some grow up and learn how to operate as leaders in a corporate or government environment, but most burn out once they meet the next generation of golden childs. That's actually ok in a military context. Most kids right out of highsch…

They are not considered experts in their fields. They are not senior in their fields, so that criteria is already off the table, eg, how to deal with legacy, production, and high sensitivity systems in regulated environments. (There are COBOL servers there!) Data science and accounting are fields too, so not sure why that is ignored. So that leaves junior criteria. I taught in one of the depts of one of 'the better' ones, and his peers are publicly lauding him with laughable examples of 'excellence' -- nowhere close to examples we use for describing top students.

They sound like regular A/B-grade CS students: unproven new grads. Motivated and high-energy, yes, which is sensible for a junior low-trust role if they pass other basics like references and criminal checks. At our current company, we would not have hired several of them in our entry roles due to the obvious issues that our routine diligence would surface (in recent work history: associating with criminals & criminal orgs, repeat googleable public displays of racism, etc). And the rest, for likely not being at the level of top students applying to us, irrespective of evaluating on academics vs DIY. Their examples would need to be significantly more compelling to change the conversation.

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

#892

Post by jungturk »

hi_hi wrote: post #420
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?

I don't quite understand how they are gaining the access credentials required? Where I work, it takes days to onboard people, through standard processes. Whats happening in this case. Given the highly volatile, and legally gray, situation; I'd expect the front line people who usually grant access are at least flagging these requests to their boss, who flags to their boss etc. Is everyone up the chain just giving a sh…

The president appoints new bosses at all the executive branch agencies, and those bosses approve the access.

Several recent news stories have described situations where the agency head resisted and was removed.

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

#893

Post by hansvm »

tomjen3 wrote: post #875
DanielHB wrote: post #815

I just want to highlight one thing about this whole government takeover debacle. The reason you have the separation of power (legislative, judiciary, executive) is not to be efficient, it is to prevent generational abuse. Even a well intentioned benign autocrat if given power would not part ways with said power voluntarily. So even if the current administration is "good" there is no reason why this kind of power coul…

Isn't the various departments under the executive?

No. That would give the president the power of a king, something the founding fathers tried hard not to do.

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

#894

Post by walls »

wordofx wrote: post #711
rukuu001 wrote: post #646

I know it's like screaming into the void when there's a 1000+ comments but... You remember the end of Gatsby where Nick turns up at the mansion and some sinister characters have the run of the place and you-know-who is floating in the pool out back... This is what the US looks like right now. Party's over, no guests ever again. Crims have moved in instead.

It looks like the crims are being kicked out at the moment.

That’s because you’ve been lied to.

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

#895

Post by WD-42 »

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…

That’s great.

What does the infosec industry have to do with DOGE?

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

#896

Post by someothherguyy »

lucasRW wrote: post #813
b8 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get clearances even if they've used hardcore drugs such as cocaine and various more serious crimes than computer crimes. The adjudication guides for clearances explain this in more detail. I have a friend who exploited RCE full-chain exploits on productions servers and used to DDoS. He got a TS/SCI clearance no problem and didn't even finish college. I interviewed too and admitted to that stuff. They cared mor…

These guys worked for SpaceX anyway, so it's pretty much guaranteed that they were already cleared even before joining DOGE. A lot of speculation and guessing on this topic, which is surprising from news outlets which pride themselves on "facts" and "truth"... I'm not even mentioning the fact that revealing the names, handles, identities of employees and clearing saying that they have admin rights on systems X and Y,…

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/memo...

Also, why is your history all Musk'd?

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

#897

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #738
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We knew this was going to happen. That doesn't make it acceptable. The correct response in this situation is not to say "well, they were mean to him, therefore he gets to hit them back". It's to notice that he committed crimes, too many to count, and came very close to actually facing the bare minimum of consequences for them - and now he's throwing a fit and turning himself into a dictator so that that can never hap…

[flagged]

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

#898

Post by zelon88 »

nis0s wrote: post #877

I think the only relevant issue is that someone with prior associations with The Com may be vulnerable to extortion, but simply having been associated with the group doesn’t mean much by itself. Law enforcement hires people from “the other side” all the time as they have relevant domain knowledge, and navigational skills of such spaces. Saying that the federal government, or its contractors, should never hire such pe…

When the federal government does it, they approach an individual who is usually in federal custody. Then they offer a reduced penalty for whatever crime they've committed in exchange for cooperation, or acceptance of a job proposal, or something.

The individual is therefore incentivized against the organization they started at. They were just purchased away from that life. For a price that was probably reasonable. The expectation then is that the individual will cut ties with his old way of doing things and take steps to mitigate any threats from that former life.

The individual then goes through literally 250mb of PDF employment forms where they have to read and agree to a variety of legal punishments for failing the federal government in a variety of ways. They accept personal liability for the job, meaning they have some reason to follow the rules.

Not Musks team. They don't have any of that personal liability, and they get full access to data that causes these agencies to violate their own security and privacy policies. Then they go away with that data, without following any SOPs or chain of custody requirements, without any oversight, and they do whatever they want with it. They use it on personal devices that could be compromised and the government would never know because the data was taken out of scope of their IDS.

Lets say they don't get directly blackmailed, but because this person used to be in a hacker gang they have backdoors on their personal systems from the gang that they are unaware of. We just don't know, and there's no way to make sure the data is being kept safe, no way to monitor what devices it gets put on, no way to ensure anything.

It's just bad security posture all around to be doing this. But I guess that's only true if the goal is an authentic audit. That isn't the goal. Gutting federal agencies and funneling money and information to fascists is the obvious goal here.

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

#899

Post by WD-42 »

gadders wrote: post #797
h0l0cube wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the cyber criminal scene Just linking this back to the story, am I mistaken in saying that DOGE is not an intelligence agency? (It certainly is a great position to exfiltrate information however.)

I think the implication is that if the person concerned (dox-ed again by Krebs) would pass an intelligence agency review, they should be OK for fraud investigation.

Why? They aren’t the same thing, not even remotely close skill set.

Also why do people keep calling this doxxing. These are public employees.

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

#900

Post by dani__german »

firstlunchables wrote: post #421
amazingamazing wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.

Touting “first principals” is a way of revealing “I’m too dumb to understand other people’s work.” Like if you can’t understand higher level concepts and have to start on your own from Euclid, it just means you aren’t very smart but think you can be another Maxwell just by thinkin’ real hard. It’s a joke.

considering the massive amount of (still often true) information at our fingertips, appealing to authorities that have proved themselves unreliable many times in recent memories is not the benefit one might initially think it is.

"first principles" doesn't mean "go back to 2 + 2 and reinvent the rest of math".

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