Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’ – Krebs on Security – February 7, 2025 Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup. The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene. That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs. Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies. And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence. When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. (emphasis added)
The New Republic – Musk’s DOGE Teen Minion Was Once Fired for Leaking Company Secrets Edward Coristine is getting a stunning level of access to the federal government as one of Elon Musk’s DOGE cronies. He was previously fired for posting company secrets on Discord. Malcolm Ferguson / February 7, 2025 Shocking: The 19-year old DOGE goon with a questionable résumé who goes by “big balls” online was fired from his last real gig for leaking company information online. Bloomberg is reporting that Edward Coristine was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information to the competitors.” Now Coristine has access to the most sensitive internal information there is, the federal government’s, and he has no confirmed clearance that legitimizes that access. “I can confirm that Edward Coristine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” a spokesperson for Path Network told Bloomberg on Thursday. “I had access to every single machine,” Coristine wrote on Discord just weeks after being fired. But he swore he “never exploited it because it’s just not me.” He also posted that he had done “nothing contractually wrong” at Path Network. The comments were made in a Discord channel dedicated to one of Path’s competitor companies.
Strange choice of inexperienced employees for an elite forensic accounting operation looking for fraud and waste. There are actual forensic accountants. Ironically the auditors already employed by the federal government have probably been fired or pushed aside. At some point one must question whether that’s a feature not a bug
My letter to reps:
I’m not ok with this “big balls” youth with ties to some cybercriminal gang having access to my OPM, IRS, CFPB, or Social Security files. I’ve frozen my credit with the credit bureaus but what are you doing to make sure the pii of all Americans doesn’t turn up on the dark web? If this dog group was really trying to uncover fraud and waste they wouldn’t have inexperienced hatter hackers rooting around, they’d have top tier forensic accountants and HR professionals on their team. Seems pretty obvious this could be some kind of simplistic data brokering operation. We already have a serious problem with scammers overseas targeting Americans with pig butchering schemes and identity theft and foreign interest in sensitive data as evidenced by the salt typhoon breaches. I am perplexed about why Congress isn’t raising hell about this. And is Donald Trump just senile or something that he’s just letting this happen or is he really on board with it?