this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
468 points (98.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
20499 readers
1340 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
Yeh, but they aren't keeping control.
They have been elected. They have 4 years.
So far, it doesn't seem that they have broken any laws or whatever, that would cause the system to reject their workings. They've rigged the courts, so the system is unlikely to reject their workings.
I'd say it's more of a constitutional coup. They are using loop holes to seize more power.
I think it will be an attempted self-coup in 4 years.
Regardless, it isn't worth arguing about.
It's wrong. It's a shit sandwich, the flavour of shit doesn't matter.
They are breaking laws, including the constitution. The courts are trying to reject it, but have no method to enforce their rulings when the executive branch willingly ignores them and even explicitly lies the blame with the courts for trying to protect the system.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5294666/trump-white-house-constitutional-crisis-judges
I guess what I mean is that they are blasting through flimsy guardrails.
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.