This isn't so much "hacked" as someone walked through the door they left wide open. They just hid it behind a bush.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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You know that episode of Silicon Valley where the kid genius hacker admits he took down the bank on accident because he didn't know what the fuck he was doing?
i'm seeing the parallels between Elon and the Carver
But was it a SQL database?
This thinks DOGE uses SQL
I would guess no, just so Elon can feel like he's right. lol
JFC is their moto seriously "The people voted for major reform"? First, they barely won and are acting like there was some monumental landslide victory.
Second, none of what they're doing is actually what they campaigned on. Trump actually tried to distance himself as much as possible from Project 2025 during the campaign.
The bad side of this:
- It's going to be stupidly expensive to fix
- It's going to take years to hire and train, or rehire lost staff to do the fixing
- People are going to lose services and probably money that they need
- It achieves nothing
The good side:
Fascists lie about everything. If a fascist ever tells the truth, it's either a mistake or a coincidence that conveniently aligns with their propaganda and goals.
That's just how fascism is, and always will be.
He campaigned for "I will fix everything on day one" and gave zero details, so if you voted for that I have a bridge to sell you. It was obvious, painfully obvious, that project 2025 was their program and since it had more that 3 pages and no pictures, trump didn't understand it.
Trump was caught on thousands of lies already, from crowd sizes, to cat eating, to covid curing, to sexual assault, to taxes, to hurricane paths, to state secrets, to election results. People knew VERY WELL what they were getting with him. This is no surprise. They voted exactly for this.
About the result, I'm going to have to quote fast an furious here, doesn't matter if by an inch or a mile...
Besides, polls indicate that he is at his highest EVER approval rating. Not only people voted for this, they are actually enjoying this. Yes, you and me see where this is going, but the average voter still thinks that this is fine. Americans are dumb as fuck and (at least in Europe) the relationship has been damaged for generations. I was super supportive the first Trump admin and I thought the people learned their lesson, but apparently it just took the billionaires fucking up egg prices for people to shoot themselves in the floor with a cannon.
There will be lots of pikachu faces just before leopards eat them and at this point I can't help but shrug. I don't think "I told you so" helps, but it's all i have.
It doesn't help that the Dems are continuing to act like it was a major victory, and that they are so weak and powerless to do anything.
Don't be ignorant. Dems were on the same side. She quit so fast after the election counters were cracked that it was obvious she was already bought the fuck out.
You know it's honestly more believable that she was bought than that the dems just accidentally ran a campaign that was so heinously out of touch.
Six one way, half a dozen the other. That campaign wasn't a mistake. It was paid for being a "mistake."
2/3 voting age Americans did not vote for this. That's a fact.
They should have voted to prevent this, but only half of them did. They other half lived through the first Trump admin and decided that it was not worth a few minutes of their time to prevent it. They didn't have to cross an ocean or fight a war... they needed to visit a website to get registered and the mail a form (or stand in line for a while) to vote, and they didn't.
In other words, only 1/3 of Americans voted against this.
Musk cracked the counters. Trump candidly admited to exactly that about 53m into one of his "inauguration" speels.
Voter turnout was 64% which means 36% of Americans didn't give enough of a shit to vote. Combine that with those who did vote for Trump and yeah, more than 2/3rds of Americans may as well have voted for it
Edit: the distinction may not matter to you but it does to the countries your country is fucking over
Wait until you find out about Brexit...
Isn't it crazy that basically every election at this point is basically like:
- Option 1) We keep the status quo, nothing really changes.
- Option 2) We burn it all down to the ground. Not to rebuild something better, but just for the hell of it.
That was a referendum, but my point basically was that the government was like "we have a mandate to leave the EU fully" when the vote result was like... 52% in favour, and many people (including some I know personally) regret voting leave because they didn't realise how significant the EU was.
Of course, there was a 2019 election where the conservative party won on a "get brexit done"' campaign under Boris Johnson, but their opposition was split between Lib Dems (wanted a second referendum and was quite clear) and Labour (run under Corbyn who already lost an election, was extremely incompetent and hard to elect, and decided for some reason in this crucial time to fencesit the entire Brexit issue. All I can remember is them offering free WiFi which has the same vibes of the 2024 national service campaign)
All he cares about is getting revenge and eating hamburders he's letting everyone else do whatever the fuck they want.
As everyone expected.
So what you're saying is that gasp the Cheeto lied?
He would never!
Dont worry! Surely our robust legal system can sort this out!
Anyone who leaves a message in full view to announce they've accessed the system isn't the real danger. If whoever this is could get in, so can the real experts from China, Russia, North Korea, etc. There's no way Musk's DOGE people, in their destructive haste, have taken any care over security. It's even likely his team of punchable kids put in their own backdoors, thinking they were being clever. If and when foreign adversaries find their way in through those, they're not putting up an announcement.
Sorry for the wall of text.
You would hope that a public front end is entirely isolated from critical systems.
Hackers got in.
Either they saw there was nothing of value, and figured they would embarrass the owners.
They got in, saw shitloads of value, but decided the ethical thing was to embarrass as opposed to exfil/exploit/sell the access.
Or the hackers were explicitly aiming to embarrass the owners, and didn't explore scope beyond that.
It's likely "gay furry hackers" or similar, and it's "grey hat" hacking.
The ethical route, ie "white hat", is to contact the owners about the exploit with a fixed period disclosure. Ie, "fix this in 30-90 days, or we will publish our method".
"Gray hat" are more like this. Where they find an exploit, it could go deeper, but they do some lulz instead. Basically make it obvious something has been hacked, but not actually exploit it further.
"Black hat" would find the exploit (even if it was limited access) then sell it while trying to leave no trace, so it can be exploited again. Or straight up exploit it themselves.
There is a possibility of foreign agents doing false-flag gray hat shit. Exfil sensitive data, cover their tracks, then "botch" some "hahaha you've been pwnd" stuff. Both getting sensitive data, and derailing the US government (because Musk has been authorised by Trump. It's a huge undermining).
With the timeline, this seems like gray hat, or black hat further exploited by gray hat. Or false flag.
The obvious aim is to embarrass the owners.
This casts serious political shade on the DOGE servers that have been hooked into government networks without oversight. Any further data exfil is a bonus to certain foreign countries.
Best case scenario is that this is domestic gray hat, the muSSk team learn from it, and figure out how actual internet security works, and harden their systems accordingly.
I mean, the actual best case is that this DOGE coup gets stopped. But the president has authorised DOGE, so this is what America wants. So, not a coup.
Ideally, this hack has 0 actual scope of security vulnerability.
Other than the "yeh, but if they can get into your public web server (something expected to be hardened as fuck, and might as well be static file hosting. Seriously, why is there a database for this shit), how can we trust your servers on government networks".
But chances are the exploits to get into this server will be similar to the exploits to get into the government connected DOGE systems. Unless the sysadmin & network admins (god bless them) have managed to maintain some control that muSSk doesn't understand, and are able to mitigate the tsunami of access such a compromised server might unleash.
I expect it was an internal hack. Like a DOGE person left for the day with their terminal open and a federal employee took the opportunity to make it look bad for DOGE
the muSSk team learn from it, and figure out how actual internet security works, and harden their systems accordingly.
They won't. Musk is a narcissist who thinks his every instruction is perfection, and his merry gang of racist goons are wet-behind-the-ears grads who have yet to be humbled by experience.
My predicted outcome is they fix this hole, send the FBI after the grey-hats to make an example out of them, and continue on business as usual while a foreign nation laughs from the shadows with a rootkit installed. DOGE is a treasure trove of data, and network security is a cat and mouse game that takes real manpower and time to set up, maintain, and actively monitor. I don't think these chucklefucks know anything about being a high-value target of state actors, and they're too prideful to admit it and get help.
Yeh, the difference between being high value (twitter) and an actual high value (government) target are entirely different. I bet many countries were salivating over the mere idea of these servers.
I guess they will pass some laws about "hacking being illegal", arrest some poor self-hosters that did nothing wrong, declare a victory, and change absolutely nothing - other than ruining people's lives.
I remember an article about a batch of compromised NICs from China that had backdoor firmware in them. You can harden your software system all you want, but when the literal hardware is backdoored, you are doomed.
I think it was Supermicro. So am American company and not a small Mfr.
I wonder if DOGE have reputable hardware, or if they cheapest out on servers.
Yeh, the difference between being high value (twitter) and an actual high value (government) target are entirely different.
Exactly. Tesla or Twitter might be on a country's radar for juicy IP theft reasons, but that's a speck of dust in comparison to a network full of classified government secrets. A country doesn't burn multiple zero-days and backdoor supply chains to find out the contents of the next Tesla firmware update. They sure as hell do when it gives them access to military information and civil infrastructure of a world power.
I wonder if DOGE have reputable hardware, or if they cheapest out on servers.
I doubt it. If the way Elon talks about software is indicative of his understanding of hardware or cybersecurity, he has absolutely no idea what the fuck he's actually doing. Knowing that, it's probably an off the shelf commercial rack-mount with IME enabled and the management port plugged into the same switch as the regular network interface.
Coups aren’t just for unelected people. A self-coup is when you use your power to KEEP control.
I dont recall having heard of this term yet; although of course I've heard of what it refers to happening. Thank you for sharing this here!
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The ethical route, ie “white hat”, is to contact the owners about the exploit with a fixed period disclosure. Ie, “fix this in 30-90 days, or we will publish our method”.
I'm not sure that is the ethical route when you're talking about disrupting the operations of a Nazi-led government.
Hmm, maybe I mean moral?
Like, there is a correct way to go about something regardless of context.
As opposed to doing something because of the context.
Any exploit should be notified to the software/platform maintainers with a proper disclosure timeline to ensure it gets fixed in a timely way.
That is the correct way.
Abusing the shit out of a poorly implemented nazi government is the moral thing to do, but would go against a white hat's ethics. Collectively a good thing to do, but not the correct thing to do as a white hat.
Are gray hats more ethically and morally true?
This is getting to deep for me.
I guess you could consider someone who is staunchly whitehat with no exceptions to have a creed/code, where they consider the rules transcendent of any specific situation (e.g. nazi websites).
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Yeah
If it were me as a hacker and I wanted to cause real damage:
“The US Federal Reserve is now deleted, US currency to be backed by bitcoin”
Or
“We have found evidence Fort Knox contains no gold. Biggest fraud in history”
Or
“US military contracts cancelled due to extreme overpayment”
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Elon hired a bunch of SBFs who play video games at work and claim they're geniuses.
ScriptKiddies.
It's classic Dunning-Kruger. They think it's easy, and they know what they're doing.
This is so 2010's
As expected lol
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