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kyle saulnier / thèriot.

@kylesaulnier.bsky.social

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composer | bass | baritone saxophone
the Awakening Orchestra | thèriot.

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Reposted by kyle saulnier / thèriot.

Anonymous

@youranoncentral.bsky.social

Musk’s DOGE involved in what appears to be a foreign espionage operation and data theft. They also have death threatened US federal whistleblowers and disabled security systems, deliberately allowing Russian IPs to access sensitive US federal government systems.

www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

The IT team met to discuss insider threats - namely, the DOGE engineers, whose activities it had little insight into or control over. "We had no idea what they did," he explained. Those conversations are reflected in his official disclosure.
They eventually launched a formal breach investigation, according to the disclosure, and prepared a request for assistance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). However, those efforts were disrupted without an explanation, Berulis said. That was deeply troubling to Berulis, who felt he needed help to try to get to the bottom of what happened and determine what new vulnerabilities might be exploited as a result.
In the days after Berulis and his colleagues prepared a request for CISAs help investigating the breach, Berulis found a printed letter in an envelope taped to his door, which included threatening language, sensitive personal information and overhead pictures of him walking his dog, according to the cover letter attached to his official disclosure. It's unclear who sent it, but the letter made specific reference to his decision to report the breach. Law enforcement is investigating the letter.

While investigating the data taken from the agency, Berulis tried to determine its ultimate destination. But whoever had exfiltrated it had disguised its destination too, according to the disclosure.
DOGE staffers had permission to access the system, but removing data is another matter.
Berulis says someone appeared to be doing something called DNS tunneling to prevent the data exfiltration from being detected. He came to that conclusion, outlined in his disclosure, after he saw a traffic spike in DNS requests parallel to the data being exfiltrated, a spike 1,000 times the normal number of requests.
When someone uses this kind of technique, they set up a domain name that pings the target system with questions or queries. But they configure the compromised server so that it answers those DNS queries by sending out packets of data, allowing the attacker to steal information that has been broken down into smaller chunks.
"We've seen Russian threat actors do things like this on
U.S. government systems," said one threat intelligence researcher who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly by their employer.
That analyst, who has extensive experience hunting nation-state-sponsored hackers, reviewed the whistleblower's technical claims.

Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts - and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis. While it's possible the user was disguising their location, it's highly unlikely they'd appear to be coming from Russia if they wanted to avoid suspicion, cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR explained.
On their own, a few failed login attempts from a Russian IP address aren't a smoking gun, those cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR said. But given the overall picture of activity, it's a concerning sign that foreign adversaries may already be searching for ways into government systems that DOGE engineers may have left exposed.
"When you move fast and break stuff, the opportunity to ride the coattails of authorized access is ridiculously easy to achieve," said Handorf. What he means is that if DOGE engineers left access points to the network open, it would be very easy for spies or criminals to break in and steal data behind DOGE.
He said he could also see foreign adversaries trying to recruit or pay DOGE team members for access to sensitive data. "It would not surprise me if DOGE is accidentally compromised."

April 16, 2025 at 10:29 AM

kyle saulnier / thèriot.

@kylesaulnier.bsky.social

Full thread. ⬇️

NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · Mar 16

(1/X) People often say things like "why does Trump appeal to people?" The answer is simple: he tells them what they want to hear. He has no beliefs of his own so he has infinite flexibility to do so.

That is what narcissistic sociopaths are like. And that is why in any discussion of Trump...

March 16, 2025 at 3:16 AM

Reposted by kyle saulnier / thèriot.

Amanda Marcotte

@amandamarcotte.bsky.social

Killing children is by design, I'm afraid. "Pro-natalists" like Musk claim they aren't racist, but their pressure to have children is solely focused on white women, while they back policies that literally kill of non-white children.

He's a eugenicist.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.

A journey through the front lines of global poverty shows that when the world’s richest men slash aid for the world’s poorest children, the result is sickness, starvation and death.

www.nytimes.com

March 15, 2025 at 4:21 PM

Reposted by kyle saulnier / thèriot.

Brendel

@brendelbored.bsky.social

I think what is making everyone so angry isn’t just the cowardice of Senate Democrats, it’s their cowardice in comparison to the random normal person who runs for school board to oust a Moms for Liberty freak

March 14, 2025 at 11:42 PM