One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and data.
Image: Shutterstock. Greg Meland.
The Trump administration has fired at least 130 employees at the federal government’s foremost cybersecurity body — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Those dismissals reportedly included CISA staff dedicated to securing U.S. elections, and fighting misinformation and foreign influence operations.
Earlier this week, technologists with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at CISA and gained access to the agency’s email and networked files. Those DOGE staffers include Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former denizen of the “Com,” an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.
The investigative journalist Jacob Silverman writes that Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a KGB double agent who spied for the United States. Silverman recounted how Martynov’s wife Natalya Martynova moved to the United States with her two children after her husband’s death.
“Her son became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father,” Silverman wrote. “Her daughter became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”
Another member of DOGE is Christopher Stanley, formerly senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at Musk’s SpaceX. Stanley, 33, had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.
My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.
“A NATIONAL CYBERATTACK”
DOGE has been steadily gaining sensitive network access to federal agencies that hold a staggering amount of personal and financial information on Americans, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury Department.
Most recently, DOGE has sought broad access to systems at the Internal Revenue Service that contain the personal tax information on millions of Americans, including how much individuals earn and owe, property information, and even details related to child custody agreements. The New York Times reported Friday that the IRS had reached an agreement whereby a single DOGE employee — 25-year-old Gavin Kliger — will be allowed to see only anonymized taxpayer information.
The rapidity with which DOGE has rifled through one federal database after another in the name of unearthing “massive fraud” by government agencies has alarmed many security experts, who warned that DOGE’s actions bypassed essential safeguards and security measures.
“The most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, referring to DOGE as a national cyberattack. “It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.”
Jacob Williams is a former hacker with the U.S. National Security Agency who now works as managing director of the cybersecurity firm Hunter Labs. Williams kicked a virtual hornet’s nest last week when he posted on LinkedIn that the network incursions by DOGE were “a bigger threat to U.S. federal government information systems than China.”
Williams said while he doesn’t believe anyone at DOGE would intentionally harm the integrity and availability of these systems, it’s widely reported (and not denied) that DOGE introduced code changes into multiple federal IT systems. These code changes, he maintained, are not following the normal process for vetting and review given to federal government IT systems.
“For those thinking ‘I’m glad they aren’t following the normal federal government IT processes, those are too burdensome’ I get where you’re coming from,” Williams wrote. “But another name for ‘red tape’ are ‘controls.’ If you’re comfortable bypassing controls for the advancement of your agenda, I have questions – mostly about whether you do this in your day job too. Please tag your employer letting them know your position when you comment that controls aren’t important (doubly so if you work in cybersecurity). All satire aside, if you’re comfortable abandoning controls for expediency, I implore you to decide where the line is that you won’t cross in that regard.”
The DOGE website’s “wall of receipts” boasts that Musk and his team have saved the federal government more than $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts. But a team of reporters at The New York Times found the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.
For example, DOGE claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract, when the total amount was actually $8 million, The Times found.
“Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted,” reads a Times story with six bylines. “Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”
So far, the DOGE website does not inspire confidence: We learned last week that the doge.gov administrators somehow left their database wide open, allowing someone to publish messages that ridiculed the site’s insecurity.
A screenshot of the DOGE website after it was defaced with the message: “These ‘experts’ left their database open – roro”
APPOINTMENTS
Trump’s efforts to grab federal agencies by their data has seen him replace career civil servants who refused to allow DOGE access to agency networks. CNN reports that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, was shown the door after she denied DOGE access to sensitive information.
King was replaced by Leland Dudek, formerly a senior advisor in the SSA’s Office of Program Integrity. This week, Dudek posted a now-deleted message on LinkedIn acknowledging he had been placed on administrative leave for cooperating with DOGE.
“I confess,” Dudek wrote. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”
Dudek’s message on LinkedIn.
According to Wired, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was also bracing this week for roughly 500 staffers to be fired, which could have serious impacts on NIST’s cybersecurity standards and software vulnerability tracking work.
“And cuts last week at the US Digital Service included the cybersecurity lead for the central Veterans Affairs portal, VA.gov, potentially leaving VA systems and data more vulnerable without someone in his role,” Wired’s Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman wrote.
NextGov reports that Trump named the Department of Defense’s new chief information security officer: Katie Arrington, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who helped steer Pentagon cybersecurity contracting policy before being put on leave amid accusations that she disclosed classified data from a military intelligence agency.
NextGov notes that the National Security Agency suspended her clearance in 2021, although the exact reasons that led to the suspension and her subsequent leave were classified. Arrington argued that the suspension was a politically motivated effort to silence her.
Trump also appointed the former chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee as the new head of the Office of National Cyber Director. Sean Cairncross, who has no formal experience in technology or security, will be responsible for coordinating national cybersecurity policy, advising the president on cyber threats, and ensuring a unified federal response to emerging cyber-risks, Politico writes.
DarkReading reports that Cairncross would share responsibility for advising the president on cyber matters, along with the director of cyber at the White House National Security Council (NSC) — a group that advises the president on all matters security related, and not just cyber.
CONSUMER PROTECTION?
The president also ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws.
The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The CFPB’s homepage has featured a “404: Page not found” error for weeks now.
Trump has appointed Russell Vought, the architect of the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, to be the CFPB’s acting director. Vought has publicly favored abolishing the agency, as has Elon Musk, whose efforts to remake X into a payments platform would otherwise be regulated by the CFPB.
The New York Times recently published a useful graphic showing all of the government staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, affecting agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk’s companies. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also have released a comprehensive account (PDF) of Musk’s various conflicts of interest.
Image: nytimes.com
As the Times notes, Musk and his companies have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, and these failures have prompted at least three federal reviews. Those include an inquiry launched last year by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. Four days after taking office, Trump fired the DoD inspector general along with 17 other inspectors general.
The Trump administration also shifted the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from prosecuting misconduct in the cryptocurrency sector, reassigning lawyers and renaming the unit to focus more on “cyber and emerging technologies.”
Reuters reports that the former SEC chair Gary Gensler made fighting misconduct in a sector he termed the “wild west” a priority for the agency, targeting not only cryptocurrency fraudsters but also the large firms that facilitate trading such as Coinbase.
On Friday, Coinbase said the SEC planned to withdraw its lawsuit against the crypto exchange. Also on Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced on X that a cybersecurity breach led to the theft of more than $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — making it the largest crypto heist ever.
ORGANIZED CRIME AND CORRUPTION
On Feb. 10, Trump ordered executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.”
Trump’s action also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and KleptoCapture Task Force — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime.
That’s according to the independent Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an investigative journalism outlet that until very recently was funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The OCCRP lost nearly a third of its funding and was forced to lay off 43 reporters and staff after Trump moved to shutter USAID and freeze its spending. NBC News reports the Trump administration plans to gut the agency and leave fewer than 300 staffers on the job out of the current 8,000 direct hires and contractors.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote this week that the sudden hold on USAID foreign assistance funding has frozen an estimated $268 million in agreed grants for independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries — including several under repressive regimes.
Elon Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization” without evidence, and promoted fringe theories on his social media platform X that the agency operated without oversight and was rife with fraud. Just months before the election, USAID’s Office of Inspector General announced an investigation into USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the government of Ukraine.
KrebsOnSecurity this week heard from a trusted source that all outgoing email from USAID now carries a notation of “sensitive but unclassified,” a designation that experts say could make it more difficult for journalists and others to obtain USAID email records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Feb. 20, Fedscoop reported also hearing the same thing from multiple sources, noting that the added message cannot be seen by senders until after the email is sent.
FIVE BULLETS
On Feb. 18, Trump issued an executive order declaring that only the U.S. attorney general and the president can provide authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, and that this authority extends to independent agencies operating under the executive branch.
Trump is arguing that Article II, Clause 1 of the Constitution vests this power with the president. However, jurist.org writes that Article II does not expressly state the president or any other person in the executive branch has the power to interpret laws.
“The article states that the president is required to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'” Juris noted. “Jurisdiction to interpret laws and determine constitutionality belongs to the judicial branch under Article III. The framers of the Constitution designed the separation of duties to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful.”
The executive order requires all agencies to submit to “performance standards and management objectives” to be established by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and to report periodically to the president.
Those performance metrics are already being requested: Employees at multiple federal agencies on Saturday reported receiving an email from the Office of Personnel Management ordering them to reply with a set of bullet points justifying their work for the past week.
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the notice read. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.”
An email sent by the OPM to more than two million federal employees late in the afternoon EST on Saturday, Feb. 22.
In a social media post Saturday, Musk said the directive came at the behest of President Trump, and that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. Meanwhile, Bloomberg writes the Department of Justice has been urging employees to hold off replying out of concern doing so could trigger ethics violations. The National Treasury Employees Union also is advising its employees not to respond.
A legal battle over Trump’s latest executive order is bound to join more than 70 other lawsuits currently underway to halt the administration’s efforts to massively reduce the size of the federal workforce through layoffs, firings and attrition.
KING TRUMP?
On Feb. 15, the president posted on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” citing a quote often attributed to the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Four days later, Trump referred to himself as “the king” on social media, while the White House nonchalantly posted an illustration of him wearing a crown.
Trump has been publicly musing about running for an unconstitutional third-term in office, a statement that some of his supporters dismiss as Trump just trying to rile his liberal critics. However, just days after Trump began his second term, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to amend the Constitution so that Trump — and any other future president — can be elected to serve a third term.
This week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rep. Ogles reportedly led a group of Trump supporters calling itself the “Third Term Project,” which is trying to gain support for the bill from GOP lawmakers. The event featured images of Trump depicted as Caesar.
A banner at the CPAC conference this week in support of The Third Term Project, a group of conservatives trying to gain support for a bill to amend the Constitution and allow Trump to run for a third term.
Russia continues to be among the world’s top exporters of cybercrime, narcotics, money laundering, human trafficking, disinformation, war and death, and yet the Trump administration has suddenly broken with the Western world in normalizing relations with Moscow.
This week President Trump stunned U.S. allies by repeating Kremlin talking points that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator.” The president repeated these lies even as his administration is demanding that Zelensky give the United States half of his country’s mineral wealth in exchange for a promise that Russia will cease its territorial aggression there.
President Trump’s servility toward an actual dictator — Russian President Vladimir Putin — does not bode well for efforts to improve the cybersecurity of U.S. federal IT networks, or the private sector systems on which the government is largely reliant. In addition, this administration’s baffling moves to alienate, antagonize and sideline our closest allies could make it more difficult for the United States to secure their ongoing cooperation in cybercrime investigations.
It’s also startling how closely DOGE’s approach so far hews to tactics typically employed by ransomware gangs: A group of 20-somethings with names like “Big Balls” shows up on a weekend and gains access to your servers, deletes data, locks out key staff, takes your website down, and prevents you from serving customers.
When the federal executive starts imitating ransomware playbooks against its own agencies while Congress largely gazes on in either bewilderment or amusement, we’re in four-alarm fire territory. At least in theory, one can negotiate with ransomware purveyors.
Brian,
Thank you for the summary. It was thoroughly reported. We won’t know the full extent of the damage for quite some time.
“Move fast and break things.” may not be a bad motto for venture capitalists who are happy if 10% of their investments pay off. It is not a good way to run a life or a government.
— Michael
Trump train – this is what I voted for. Thank you Mr. President keep it up.
Scam victim Stockholm Syndrome?
One out of every three Trump voters are just as stupid as the other two.
“Oh, and for the supporters, he has found *zero* major fraud and abuse…”
Not that I expect this to make a difference to you, but I have to ask what you think this might be about? It definitely is not a rounding error. https://x.com/Chesschick01/status/1891712559889145952
Again, not that I expect a retired fed worker to be outraged, but I have to wonder what the justification is for this BS.
https://x.com/idontexistTore/status/1891274429654564945
As far as Musk goes, I have to wonder why the feds use Starshield, a business unit of SpaceX for national security programs. It was adapted from the global communications network Starlink but brings additional capabilities such as target tracking, optical and radio reconnaissance, and early missile warning. It seems that would involve all kinds of top secret stuff. I guess anyone can get that contract. Starshield customers include the Space Development Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and the United States Space Force. As of 2025, at least 118 Starshield satellites have been launched. The program has received a $1.8 billion contract from the US government to construct hundreds of spy satellites for continuous real-time monitoring of targets around the globe. If it is accurate that he can’t get a security clearance, (?) I’m guessing his recent acquisistion of Twitter and what he did with it must have enraged the left, even though they had no problem signing a contract for top secret military applications. He couldn’t get any consideration when Brandon was promoting electric cars as the future for America either, even though he is by far and away the biggest seller of electric vehicles. Sure sounds like they were holding a grudge, but then you being a federal government expert probably know best.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon_Musk (Read to the end, if you care to see the result of that…
I mean it’s outrageous that he wasted 44 BILLION only to run it into the ground, but enrageous? Lol.)
Quite a difference between dealing with a corporate entity vs. Musk himself, personally micro-managing 100%.
(Ukraine found that line to blur when he disabled their Starlink drone fleets on the eve of a major counterpush.)
But the glaring problem I see above lies with blurring the hero worship lore aspect he’s desperate to cultivate,
(ie: cheating at video games for teenage bragging rights, then getting caught and forced to sheepishly admit it.)
vs the ‘moderate’ successes (also amidst major missteps) his corporate products have managed to achieve,
with the obvious observation that he’s taking credit for all wins (of others) personally yet socializing any pitfalls.
People getting injured at your Fremont plant? Sweep it under a rug and create the narrative of “OSHA greed”.
“Full auto” driving getting people killed because they use it as you advertised? Shut them down with NDA’s.
Cybertrucks worth $50k less the day they pay for it and the guinea pigs are mad? Disable the serfs remotely.
Rockets blowing up because of a breaking-things-good launch schedule result in your FAA license being killed?
Don’t fix the problem in your safety culture, just fire the head of FAA because “FAA greed”. Roy Cohn Inc.
“Northrop Grumman was selected to partner with SpaceX, with insiders noting that “it is in the government’s interest to not be totally invested in one company run by one person” – Darn insiders, do they even rock little red hats like the rest of the cult?
TLDR, Starshield is cheaper/lighter than the current mil solution. The resolution optics for LEO are improved from higher orbit solutions in place for decades. Musk doesn’t personally need a security clearance for an SCI compartmentalized project to be authorized to a company in his portfolio, provided xyz checks are met. Couple that with the idea of removing ALL the usual checks (and the people making them from their jobs), the “Dog” plan, and the opportunity climate for self-dealing of MASSIVE .gov contracts to his personal portfolio of companies, literally all of them, becomes evident. This is what oligarchy looks like – they buy the levers and then use the levers to buy even more. What are you an expert of, Leo, since it’s not government contracts and conflicts of interest in plain sight?
This inspires me to think (plus rant, hallucinate, and puke) Apple’s announced working with Starlink is not so great.
Wow, hard to pick out the few actual worries in the freakin’ rainfall of tears, good buddy!
A lot of what is happening HAD to happen, as there is never endless encores to a farce.
Will be neat when the collective childhood imaginary fears abate and reality checks in.
I’ve really enjoyed many of the comments, and very glad I lave high-tops on and am not drinking my decaf, as the whining is bipolar between side-splitting hilarious and the sort of BS that does leave a stain.
“as there is never endless encores to a farce.” So you realize it’s a farce yet applaud anyway?
Good luck with the hilarious bipolar stuff.
tell me you’re a 14 year old, without telling me you’re a 14 year old…
butthurt brian kvetching a bit in hopes his backdoor funding doesn’t get cut by the guys who fired his fraudulent friends and family members from their bias positions they weren’t qualified to hold
Are you qualified to use punctuation? And follow-up, you think he’s doing this to get rich or something lol?
I often wondered how Krebs was funded. No ads. Does he have a second job?
There are literally two ads on this page.
I used to work at one of the largest international tech companies. People would ask me, “How many people work at your company?” My answer was always, “About half of them.”
I like the “rip the band-aid off” approach. While there will be short-term pain and missteps, the Federal government has grown into an enormously large and inefficient machine.
Out-of-control spending and misuse of taxpayers’ dollars caused painful inflation that left so many Americans homeless and hungry. It needs to be reined in.
Scale back, then take corrective action where you cut too much.
The unquenchable thirst for greed and perpetual striving to get something for nothing through investment returns is where inflation comes from. A supply chain incident happens because of a pandemic, there’s no safety net, and the corporations take advantage of supply and demand to reset the market at higher prices for higher margin because they can get away with it for shareholder returns. Mostly made up of other extremely rich execs to whom can’t stop their perpetual quest for more. Regular people take the hit with higher prices, because the corporations aren’t going to take it – they’ve been too busy for decades paying out trillions to people with nine figures and above for doing nothing.
The irony is in your own post, using an example of a large corporation for inefficiency. Where do you think the money for the government is going to go? Straight to contracted incentives to pay millions for a few lousy jobs with the rest of the overhead going to the execs. Look up the Wisconsin Foxconn plant disaster Trump promoted in his first go around that the state spent millions of infrastructure money on that Foxconn conned incentives out of. That’s efficiency of privatization at its finest. Billionaires run good propaganda campaigns, that’s for sure.
You are wrong right out of the gate. Inflation is the result of our central bank, (with the federal government’s blessing) printing trillions of dollars in debt so the peons can be sent a check for a few hundred dollars because the government shut down all private businesses, churches, schools, factories, etc. But they left open essential businesses like, Walmart, Home Depot, strip clubs, liqour stores, etc. See a pattern here? Then there are all those green new deal jobs where millions of taxpayer dollars were given to startups in the form of grants and forgiveable loans, and a few months later they declare bankruptcy. Why is the government and the media not interested enough to investigate? The government is corrupt, the media are accomplices, and the “neutral” perpetual federal worker is facilitating the scam.
So wait, you do remember who issued those checks, whose administration the pandemic occurred under, who vehemently denied it was a problem early on and consistently fought both vaccines and basic sanitary virus protocols like masks and distancing, and yet you support that same administration to “fix” “everything” that went wrong because of those decisions? Okay…
Then you launch into a red herring tangent about *(wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra), which was admittedly a disaster, but probably for reasons beyond your comprehension and/or interest in knowing about – *(Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.[19] This precipitous drop in the cost of raw materials for Solyndra’s competitors rendered CIGS technology incapable of competing, and other factors, including a contemporaneous drop in the price of natural gas, together with the faltering of the corresponding financial models, also contributed to Solyndra’s demise,[20] despite quickly raising capital.) – So yes, a waste of a half billion dollars, a missed opportunity, a disaster where lessons were surely learned, but not really an economy-changing loss. Compare that to the tax breaks for the richest .01% of Americans which literally compounds the debt several % higher than it would be otherwise, quarterly, ongoing forever. Or did you think that was just about to trickle down to you? Think hard Leo.
Oh wait, did you take the clot shot? That explains much. Have you not heard? Masks don’t work against a virus and Fauci literally pulled the 6 foot rule out of his butt. Not a red herring. A little due diligence could have prevented flushing millions away or at least made it a loan and not a gift. Something tells me the principals at Solyndra walked away with much more than they had. Other companies have pulled this scam as well. You do remember whose administration was giving away this money right? Liberals always have excuses. They never own anything. See yourself yet? Here’s a red herring for you. USAID is dead already and they won’t be stealing anymore money for democrat leftist NGOs that comes back to them as campaign donations.
“Masks don’t work against a virus” – False. They have % efficacy.
I didn’t specify a 6 foot rule, I said distancing has an effect on R.
“A little due diligence could have prevented flushing millions away”
So compare that to the 44 Billion Musk wasted on Twitter anytime.
“Other companies have pulled this scam as well.” – Which ones?
You made the claim, go ahead and back that one up also.
“You do remember whose administration was giving away this money”
Trump signed 2 of the 3 stimulus checks and is floating another one…
“Liberals always have excuses.” I’m not a liberal, you’re just dumb.
USAID also isn’t dead nor is the point of spending it any less strategic.
Some people, apparently, can’t manage a single strategic thought
because they’ve given over 50% of their brains to party politics.
Pity them, the charity cases don’t realize what they do.
“Medicaid and Medicare won’t be touched”
-Proceeds to basically gut them.
Face it holmes, you chained yourself to a lie.
Hope your blood pressure pills come from Mexico…
You realize debt and currency of a government is not like consumer debt right? It shouldn’t even be called the same thing. The state provides currency as a medium of goods and services, and government debt services all the infrastructure, security, and investment in the citizens of the country. As long as the populace has mutual trust in the currency that it has value to be redeemed for goods and services, it’s valid.
I own government debt through T-Bills, which I receive a REASONABLE return on and REASONABLY reinvest into the economy I’m in, and contribute to through knowledge, skills, abilities, and effort as an engineer.
Notice the key word here: reasonable. My primary income is through the usage of my skills and abilities, not through casino investment culture to selfishly give myself excess luxury by doing nothing. I’m not attempting to insert my ego like a sociopath into the capitalist ownership class to maximize return by buying up assets to milk every nickel out of those in lower classes who also earn their income through actual skill and effort and not from the couch waiting for a return. The only guardrail to “reasonable” for the excess greed of sociopath billionaires is through the populace being collectively represented by the arm of state speaking for and marketing itself with a return based on collective labor, consumer market, taxpayer paid for collective material infrastructure and intellectual investments that all these billionaires completely rely upon.
I’m not making my primary goal of my existence the exploitation and consumption of resources for excessive personal gain and then pointing the finger down at the ants wondering why crime and recidivism happens when it correlates in every instance with income inequity, when centuries of punitive authoritarian empires run by the wealthy and powerful have collapsed.
But by all means, continue with your propaganda ridden worldview that your enemy some federal employee working on everything from preventing flooding destroying housing to malware being installed on critical infrastructure is causing all the toil and suffering in the world. Every one of those employees could be fired, the budget could be balanced, and you wouldn’t see a single benefit of it all, because you’re still going to have a handful of billionaires racing to become the first trillionaire while they manipulate you to find the next poor scapegoat for all your anguish.
So true, as a prior DOD employee I can tell you there are so many redundant positions in the DOD. I am so glad someone has finally had the balls to cut some of these Welfare recipients. I have always said that when one door shuts two more doors open. Nothing better then losing your job to put a fire under your backside to retrain and enter into a better career field.
And what was your Rating and Rate, comrade propagandist? DOD calling DOD “welfare recipients” strikes me as a ricky doughnut of the ASMO variety, rookie. Where did you say you did basic and under whom? Stolen valor may not be a crime under General Bonespurs, but you can still get a tune up.
It’s hilarious how many cultists here are praising the cuts because it’s a government agency and they’re so ‘inefficient’, and prefer the industrious genius of the private sector.
Lets take a look at that private sector right now. Crowdstrike caused the biggest outage in history because they rushed with their super efficient sensor updates they promoted as safe to all these meritorious C-suite execs making 8 or 9 figures and collapsed national infrastructure.
Broadcom just M&A’ed the monopoly of the biggest datacenter hypervisor company, leaving the C-suite geniuses scrambling now having to pay 4x-5x or more in licensing costs for their companies.
And the AI ponzi scheme around Big Tech of oohs and ahhs hasn’t evolved beyond a business plan of ‘lets throw billions in compute at this thing and we’ll figure out a real life changing use for it later, for now generating the same thing the first link of an internet of a search does is fine.’
And the head honcho of this privatization tech-oligarchy euphoria who won the dot com casino so is super smart, rips his companies servers out of the floor in a drug induced manic episode, and doesn’t even know SQL **doesn’t mean** SQL Server as of a few days ago with his own personal platform of brilliance.
All hail the efficient privatization overlords saving the world in the Gilded Age of Idiocracy.
Dear Brian,
Thank you for your article. I have followed you blog for years.
It’s a shame that people resort to vitriol rather than reasoned argument.
The recent developments in the USA are very concerning. As a non-USA citizen I do wonder whether those who support Donald Trump understand the implications of the President’s actions.
The Chinese Communist Party will be delighted that the USA is isolating itself from its allies. Divide and rule.
The evidence to date suggests an attempt to capture the state (i.e. the USA) and create a kleptocracy.
The Russian people don’t, or can’t complain, so why would the people of the USA?
Please keep up your good work.
” I do wonder whether those who support Donald Trump understand the implications of the President’s actions.”
-Let me just tell you, they don’t. They don’t do critical thought anymore, it was literally banned in Texas schools.
Why? Because parents complained. Not even making that up, absurd as it sounds in the microcosm.
Representative government sure sounded like a good idea before it actually emulated the masses…
Insert H.L. Mencken quote.
I am a long term fan of your investigations and I can tell you …. the above article is a mix of real concerning items, with a bunch of MSNBC-like “cry me a river” boo-boo items, and others things to be watched and investigated later if needed.
Try to not ruin your website mixing truths with political hysteria, Brian.
The conflict-of-interest chart from NY Times about Elon’s DOGE work is a fantasy … but Press can watch and later investigate if necessary…,
That chat cant be serious… That’s not an “a-ha moment”. That’s simply ridiculous. That chart lacks any base, it’s a complete “plane earth” conspiracy theory, exactly like some stuff DT says out loud.
Any government changes their leads and there’ll always be conflicts of interest. The Press must WATCH and EVALUATE these moves and their results independently.
The reduction of investment on NIST and CISA is a concern. Let’s see what comes from that.
“Big Balls” being too young and “grandson of a spy” is another BS! Please, let it go. It’s just a person. It’s your second post about him…
There are tons of ways to trace what he’s doing with databases. Wait, at least, for him or someone else to try doing something wrong… No thief leaves without trace. Basic Forensics rule. If there’s misuse, they will get caught and prosecuted, I am sure.
Calling Ukraine president as dictator while trying to ally with Putin is REALLY BAD. DT is shooting his own foot on that, and wasting his political capital with it. History will tell how wrong DT is.
The “third” term is another stupid move from Reps. Trump will be far old to be re-elected again, even if this idea gains momentum. Rep. Party would be very dumb if they don’t support JD Vance in 2028 … DT would be a new “joe dementia biden” in 2028 … lost in his own words during debates.
Lefty-Wingers are trying to find any excuse to scream against a 30-days old administration. U.S. Gov was overspending money in trash ideas (including diversity) for more than a decade.
The wokeness became the rule… Relaxing controls over illegal immigrants was crazy. Ugly crimes were caused by that. You know that, right?
Allowing men with d**cks compete against women was another suicidal idea and I am glad it’s finally going to be purged. I would hate to see my daughter trying to beat a FULL testosteronal-built muscles MALE in a swimming competition. They are just coward… simple as that. There’s no good outcome from such thing.
I dont mind you and some other Americans wanted an incompetent inept like Kamala to be president. But it should not influence your posts.
Please, dont “Joy Reid” your super decent and relevant Cyber Security website.
We’re still waiting for a KrebsonSecurity reader to dispute in a reasoned factual argument any of the details that Brian Krebs reported on. Note: diatribes and rants about “Left-Wingers” and “men with d**cks” do not constitute reasoned arguments.
“Big Balls” being too young and “grandson of a spy” is another BS! Please, let it go. It’s just a person.
-He’s got you there. Probably a person. I guess that means we have to let the BS go?
“The conflict-of-interest chart from NY Times about Elon’s DOGE work is a fantasy” Why on earth do you say that? Everything I’ve researched backs up those conflicts of interest. Any questions about those conflicts or about what exactly DOGE is doing, or why they are doing it are met with evasive answers at best. The most honest answers come from X… he’s shredding whole agencies and doing it carelessly… Chainsaw Man!
We’re still waiting for a factual and reasoned comment response disputing any of the details, point by point, that Brian Krebs reported on. Note: A rant filled with terms like “Left-Wingers” and “men with d*cks” is not an example of a reasoned comment response.
didn’t really sound like a rant to me. pretty reasonable I would say. The bottom line is we are five weeks in. Time will tell.
Trump is the pendulum that has swung against a government that has been increasingly corrupt, oppressive, divisive, and absolutely committed to moral degradation, and national\cultural suicide.
For all those complaining against the collapse of this status quo I have only one thing to say …
Payback is a bitch.
Okay, so what was “corrupt and oppressive” about the Consumer Protection Resource Board?
Let’s hear it, since you have a blanket excuse, no doubt you have specifics… surely…
Holden Gatsby “We’re still waiting for a factual and reasoned comment response disputing any of the details, point by point, that Brian Krebs reported on. Note: A rant filled with terms like “Left-Wingers” and “men with d*cks” is not an example of a reasoned comment response.” – has it right.
There is bipartisan support for efficient government. The tricky thing here is that the transparency that is espoused looks more like three card Monty. What is transparent is that there is a supposition in play quite successfully that Americans want “dirt“ in the form of dramatically staged photo ops. I’d be willing to bet the billions of fraud and ineptitude transparently conveyed would be highly effective and calm the nerves of the country if there was a weekly report containing confirmable data on what is being accomplished. As well, though things seem to be moving fast, drama and hysteria are never productive. It is useful to be ready to fight tooth and nail if necessary to preserve our democracy. That said, there’s lots of dust that needs to settle. I am not advocating for what appears to be the entrepreneurial “break things fast” approach to sussing out where our government is ineffective and wasteful.” One can still move fast with care. What seems to be continually lost in the sauce is that our government is not meant to make money it is meant to use taxpayer funds for taxpayers needs. Herein lies the disconnect I hope will resolve.
I significantly doubt Elon’s investigation has checked their hashes, hooked in their write blockers, and written up their methodology and maintained a well documented chain of custody throughout this entire process just based on the fact that they’re moving through departments every week or two. You can have a fast investigation, but there are procedure to ensure file integrity that will significantly slow things down. You can only go so fast before you start damaging your own case. Even something blatant like Theranos took months to get the investigation through and then a year or two to convict.
Doesn’t look like the Trump administration is moving in a way that will actually lead to cases that would actually hold up in court (unless they put the ‘corrupt politicians’ through a kangaroo court, which would go from taking US democracy out back with a shotgun to straight up nuking it), so any confidence that they will have somehow sorted things out without fudging the data is completely out. The recent (re-)release of the Epstien files being significantly modified to exclude Trump’s name, since they were a version of already publicly released files so they could be easily compared (which they couldn’t even do right, as his name still appeared lmao), just ruins their credibility even more.
Remember, Elon isn’t “an employee” nor in charge, he just writes the threatening emails? WTF?
Credibility ship has sailed.
February 25th 2025: they’re also bringing cuts to your social safety net! Whoopy!!! Now grandma no longer gets ssi, your disabled little brother no longer has insurance or meds, your veteran dad is losing his help and you have no food stamps to feed your children through economic collapse!
This isn’t a game, people will die from this. People need to stop being partisan and give a damn about eachother again!
I’ve been a fan since your Washington Post days and followed your blogs since you made that move. I rarely comment.
It pains me to see the infusion of partisan politics into this part of our world.
Keep up your good work and don’t let the critics get you down.
Calling factual balls and strikes may “seem” partisan, but it isn’t really. If you’re hyper-partisan, anything and everything is viewed through your lens of same. Trump shutting down the agency responsible for addressing and investigating scams is a fact, so reporting on that is not per se a political spin. Adding a little color to an article about the WISDOM of gutting these programs, that’s still not necessarily partisan either. In fact, take a moment to view Trump’s entire political “career” through the lens of a Left/Right Demo/Repub diode-view – and notice he doesn’t really fit either ideology but is all over the place like a sine wave. Joe Biden certainly isn’t exactly a ‘left’ actor either, despite the spin that operates under that implicit and repeated assumption. It’s reductive to automatically assume that anything describing a political decision, left or right, right or wrong, fact or invented narrative, is “political” and therefore somehow verboten. I think people who would demand that nobody EVER discuss political decisions, such as this one which directly affects the entire subject matter of this entire blog essentially, internet security in the scammer age, they are being unreasonable – but if you have anything specific that you disagreed with, go ahead and cite that so we know you’re being nuanced about it. That is, if you aren’t afraid to have a potentially-slightly-political discussion with someone who may have their own reasons to disagree with you. Do you think there’s a valid “conservative” case for removing the Consumer Protection Resource Board? Let’s hear it.
“Do you think there’s a valid “conservative” case for removing the Consumer Protection Resource Board?”
“State’s rights!”
Damn.
Oh you meant in the comments lol – I thought you meant Krebs was infusing the politics…
They’ve kinda always been like that, but a little sugar brings all the fun hummingbirds around.
Do ransomware groups party due to Trump’s policies?
Doesnt matter. When reaching out to IC3 and CISA for help against targeting the help I received was zero. Company got attacked, family got attacked and my consumer information never had protection. US has been slacking so to keep the train driving further into ground for everyone to feel impact is good enough for me. My taxes werent paying for anything anyhow.
Wanted to say great article though regardless
Regardless, great article