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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'

#951

Post by roguecoder »

hot_topic wrote: post #576
impulser_ wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

no it isn't. What a blind take. As someone who has ventured down these forums when I was younger. Its a mix of gamers/programmers/online hustlers. Some of it is grey area, some if it is renting out RDP's/VPNS for malicious users acting as middlemen for the criminals. The mob mentality of rule following software engineers on here who are throwing out the accusation that these are all hardened criminals that want to bu…

You say that like "hustling" isn't a crime, like gamergate didn't happen, like "programmers" don't write code to do all sorts of things, legal and illegal.

Some of us are old enough to know that none of this is new.

No one is saying these are "hardened" criminals, but none of them care about the consequences of what they are participating in and that is just as disqualifying for public service.

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

#952

Post by Ajedi32 »

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?

Yes, and that's precisely the root of the problem here.

If you want government that's responsive to the will of the people, then it has to be either directly elected by the people, or accountable to someone elected by the people.

The way this is supposed to work constitutionally is that Congress sets policy by law, and the executive "take[s] Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". The executive branch does not set domestic policy at all; it just implements the policy Congress set.

But what happens when the scope of government grows so much to the point where Congress cannot possibly set all policy itself? What did happen is that Congress started creating agencies and granting them broad powers over certain aspects of domestic policy. It then, as the constitution provides, became the executive's job to implement those agencies. And as any software dev knows, there's a lot of wiggle room in implementation details.

So now we end up in a situation where the executive has a huge amount of control over these agencies which in turn have a huge amount of control over us.

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

#953

Post by nis0s »

TrackerFF wrote: post #779
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…

Maybe the US 3-letter agencies are a bit more forgiving, but when I worked in intelligence there were three deadly sins that would make you untouchable as a candidate: - Drug use - Financial crimes - Close ties to hostile countries (China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, North-Korea, etc.) And at least in my country, it's not the intelligence agencies themselves that handle the security clearance, but rather a dedicated agen…

Making a judgement against someone based on where they randomly happened to be born is self-defeating as talented people who are security- and defense-oriented will just work for another place that you maybe don’t want them to work. Interestingly, most of the news I’ve come across of someone betraying national secrets has almost always concerned a white man, but maybe that’s just what I know.

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

#954

Post by marcusverus »

derbOac wrote: post #18
relaxing wrote: post #16

Good reporting here. Clarifies why the kid was fired for leaking documents - it was specifically for leaking internal corporate documents to a competitor. The details about cybercrime discords involved in SWATting and DDOS attacks are fascinating. The idea that anyone involved in this would be fast-tracked for a clearance is beyond the pale.

I personally think it says volumes about how those in the Trump-Musk group (Musk group?) see this. They see the task as infiltrating an adversary, requiring someone with the technical skills to do so but who is also disposable. This in their mind is not about improving anything in the government for citizens, or with regard to US interests, it's about gaining access to a hostile entity without regard to their interes…

> I personally think it says volumes about how those in the Trump-Musk group (Musk group?) see this. They see the task as infiltrating an adversary..

This is what actual schizophrenia looks like.

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

#955

Post by cooper_ganglia »

scrollaway wrote: post #946
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #938

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 peo…

Speaking as a European entrepreneur, the current administration’s dismantling of the government has made things extremely unstable and made certain I do not choose the US for where to do business in the coming months/years. A Delaware c corp was on the table for our latest incorporation. Instead, it’ll be in Paris. You’ve given free rein to some people to do wildly unstable shit and remove basically all accountabilit…

I have to be honest— keeping your startup in Europe is, more often than not, a recipe for failure. The regulatory burden, risk aversion, and fragmented markets make scaling nearly impossible.

Even China fosters more innovation these days. Europe feels dead in the water when it comes to innovation, aside from mandating attached water bottle caps...

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

#956

Post by Ajedi32 »

pnathan wrote: post #837
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…

This is always in my mind. Whatever we choose to let the ruler du jour do, what would, let us say, the $hitler be able to do when they come to power through the mischoices of our fellow citizens? After all, history tells us that such people will both exist and come to power. So it behooves us to be a little jealous of our own rights, and to push officials to limit other officials. There's an interesting fork here whe…

That's one issue with a two party system: it incentivizes collusion between branches that are supposed to be holding each other in check.

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

#957

Post by dang »

nomdep wrote: post #849
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…

@dang Considering how many are ready to label one of the “other side” as evil, I think it’s very irresponsible of you to allow articles about US politics in the front page, specially an article like this that it’s really an smearing attempt

> I think it’s very irresponsible of you to allow articles about US politics in the front page

There are a couple answers to that. One is that it's not possible not to. We tried once, as an experiment, and it had the counterintuitive effect of making the site more politicized.

The other answer is that a limited amount of political overlap is actually part of optimizing the site for intellectual curiosity. Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... if anyone wants more.

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

#958

Post by kridsdale3 »

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…

Is this a long way of saying you found someone with root access on the server accidentally typed `rm -rf` ?

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

#959

Post by krunck »

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…

The USA need to weaken the power of the executive. Remove the executive order power. Remove the pardon power.

And I'd even recommend that the individual president position be replaced by a group of people each of which gets voted in on different years. The monarch-like persona does not belong in a democracy.

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

#960

Post by [deleted] »

dlivingston wrote: post #201
jdross wrote: post #185

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…

I assume you're hearing this online. Can you link to some accounts or articles?

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