Programmer Humor

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.