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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'

#931

Post by red-iron-pine »

impulser_ wrote: post #499
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'…

The Com is just a general term for crime communities on the Internet. Its not a specific group. The Com includes groups that commit crimes stretching from cybercrime to literally the worst crimes you can think of and the vast majority of this is done on Discord and Telegram. You can go down a really dark rabbit hole if you really dig deep into some of these groups within The Com. This is where the worst of the worst…

"The Com" is like "Anonymous" or "the scene", like talking about the "new york heavy metal scene".

it's not one coherent group but a mix of them, sometimes overlapping but often not. they hangout in the same spaces, sometimes, but also not.

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

#932

Post by red-iron-pine »

tomrod wrote: post #919
elif wrote: post #811

I think this makes the picture quite clear. The only criteria for their selection was their ability and willingness to exfil data as fast as possible. In order to facilitate the trump blitz, as much technical action as possible needed to happen in a timeframe constrained by court procedural mechanisms.

This is why it is pretty frustrating. If they actually wanted to audit things, they'd bring in forensic accountants. Instead, they brought in "script kiddies". You aren't finding evidence of crimes after 2 days with SQL access.

they don't care about forensics, they care about exfil'ing it to Russia and China, who will do the heavy lifting.

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

#933

Post by IAmGraydon »

skrebbel wrote: post #761
romeovs wrote: post #756

tesla.sexy contains the following text, which is slightly concerning: love your fate become your own ubermensch you are the master of your soul be kind there is so much to love, so much to live for follow your heart, ok?

Why is this concerning? Note, it seems to me like their reference to "ubermensch" is to the Nietzschean definition [0] and not the Nazi remix. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Übermensch

These kids seem to have been indoctrinated into a cult of Curtis Yarvin. They love talking about Nietzschean and Yarvinist ideas like this one and cathedrals. This same creep had a quote on his Twitter bio that reads "there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see". If you don't get the reference, do some research on Yarvin. I think these people legitimately have dangerous intents.

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

#934

Post by benzible »

chonkerz wrote: post #740
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…

I think the difference is in the kind of positions the "second chance" people get hired to. They aren't put in positions where they could cause significant wide scale harm with no auditing or barriers. The debate isn't whether he should go to jail. The debate is whether he should get a clearance for some of the most powerful access someone can possibly get. He's not suitable. Why can't Musk replace him? He's just a k…

"Suitable" depends on what the aim is. If this were a good faith effort to find "waste and fraud" then clearly not. But if the goal is to destroy the capacity of the government to place any restraints on enterprise (and in particular Musk's enterprises), and an assault on the rule of law in general, and the instantiation of a racist ideology, then he's ideal. The fact that they let him go in the first place was the surprising part as what he said was no worse than what many Trump appointees have done.

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

#935

Post by kemayo »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #926
dmbche wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw4g2q62xqo Ordering them to delete everything they got copies of, and the subsequent frustration from Musk. Why cares who personally violated federal law? However he managed to, Musk got unlawful access to restricted data.

Nothing in that link speaks of deletion. Wrong article?

Second paragraph of the article:

> US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday to prohibit access, ordering Musk and his team to immediately destroy any copies of records.

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

#936

Post by wil421 »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #923
tomrod wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is pretty frustrating. If they actually wanted to audit things, they'd bring in forensic accountants. Instead, they brought in "script kiddies". You aren't finding evidence of crimes after 2 days with SQL access.

I must disagree, as our team recently encountered a critical system failure potentially stemming from internal misconduct. While our personnel are typically required to possess advanced qualifications and extensive experience, the urgency of the situation necessitated immediate action despite my relative lack of formal credentials compared to my esteemed colleagues. Given the time-sensitive nature of the incident, I…

No body cares that your coworker fat fingered some bash or SQL command. We care that kids with questionable morals have access to systems that usually require months of investigations to access.

DOGE and their laptops are probably secured by whoever picked them up from Best Buy for Elon.

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

#937

Post by lee-rhapsody »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #923
tomrod wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is pretty frustrating. If they actually wanted to audit things, they'd bring in forensic accountants. Instead, they brought in "script kiddies". You aren't finding evidence of crimes after 2 days with SQL access.

I must disagree, as our team recently encountered a critical system failure potentially stemming from internal misconduct. While our personnel are typically required to possess advanced qualifications and extensive experience, the urgency of the situation necessitated immediate action despite my relative lack of formal credentials compared to my esteemed colleagues. Given the time-sensitive nature of the incident, I…

This comment is almost certainly chatgpt.

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

#938

Post by cooper_ganglia »

The HN response to all this has actually been very strange to me. From my perspective, this presidency, and especially Musk working on DOGE, should be one of the most exciting, positive things discussed on here!

I would've thought this crowd would've loved lower taxes (more money to build things!), less regulation (less restrictions to build things!), and an unfamiliar friendliness towards the tech industry (more people to build things with!)... I'm really looking forward to building big things in this country in the next few years!

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

#939

Post by _gabe_ »

caust1c wrote: post #475
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'…

Discord is very popular with skiddies and real criminal organizations alike. It's got pretty basic KYC controls in place, meaning essentially anyone with just an email can sign up. It can be accessed from behind VPNs without any issues, so effectively it doesn't matter that it's not e2e encrypted. I feel that discord the company probably let's it slide because: 1. Moderation at scale is incredibly difficult. 2. They…

> It can be accessed from behind VPNs without any issues, so effectively it doesn't matter that it's not e2e encrypted.

How do these two things correlate? I thought the benefit of E2E encryption is the fact that no one can decrypt your messages except for the participants in the conversation. There’s no keys anywhere on a server that an admin could use to decrypt the conversation. How would being behind a VPN negate that? The VPN still has to go through Discord servers where a key is presumably stored if the information is encrypted at all.

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

#940

Post by marcusverus »

elif wrote: post #811

I think this makes the picture quite clear. The only criteria for their selection was their ability and willingness to exfil data as fast as possible. In order to facilitate the trump blitz, as much technical action as possible needed to happen in a timeframe constrained by court procedural mechanisms.

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