Tag Archives: Tucker Preston

Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

February 7, 2025

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, 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.

DDoS Mitigation Firm Founder Admits to DDoS

January 20, 2020

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A Georgia man who co-founded a service designed to protect companies from crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has pleaded to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

DDoS Mitigation Firm Has History of Hijacks

September 20, 2016

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Last week, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how BackConnect Inc. — a company that defends victims against large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — admitted to hijacking hundreds of Internet addresses from a European Internet service provider in order to glean information about attackers who were targeting BackConnect. According to an exhaustive analysis of historic Internet records, the BackConnect appears to have a history of such “hacking back” activity.