Good point.
- T'Challa
Exactly as you describe, and I'm sure for other foreign interests, everyone at DOGE became massive targets for very highly directed nation-state level interest for phishing/malware/compromise.
Hanlon's razor was originally a joke. Not a scientific observation how world works, but a funny sentence about there being a lot of incompetence in the world.
(Spanish for _Why not both?_)
Is it a good point? How so?
Without any proof or arguments, to me that Mastodon comment is just your average brain rot social media conspiracy slop, especially when you examine the profile of the user who wrote it.
Is this what journalism has now become? Parroting othe people's unhinged takes off social media, then upvoting it on HN?
I fully believe that the engineers themselves are wildly optimistic about society and their own abilities, but good security comes from realism and pessemism. Someone, probably many people, in the chain of command above them has moral and legal responsibility for choosing this course knowing it carried this risk and not caring.
Well, you’ve burned a bit of time on HN with the karma you’ve accrued. The non-conspiratorial truth is that if you go back and read HN over a longer period of time, it amounts to people parroting other people’s unhinged takes. Least offensive is tech, which is merely juvenile. But the other topics, especially medical ones, are dangerous. Political ones, with zero verification are the worst from a board culture/health perspective.
HN has turned itself into slop in large part due to the voting and flagging mechanisms, because the community was never mentally equipped to use either tools responsibly. And pg/dang never set the tone. So now you see how far it has fallen.
My advice: don’t come here to read comments seriously. Yes, from time to time someone of good taste shows up to a topic they have first hand experience with and they have to educate the rest as to why their takes are completely wrong (and sometimes dangerous, see above).
Instead, come here to get the news, laugh at the shit flinging if you must, and move on.
I’ve been contemplating doing an HN-without-HN filter board; show just the tech stuff, have commentary without voting or flagging. Because while you’re just seeing how things are now, I am afraid to say they’ve always been so.
I like these kind of speculative articles. The click bait title states something with certanity than the first sentence clarifies that it is a speculation. I am not sure why we are falling for this click baity garbage, over and over.
> Login credentials belonging to an employee at both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Government Efficiency have appeared in multiple public leaks from info-stealer malware
Does not sound like clickbait for me.
>But some of the datasets that Schutt is included in are much more concerning than normal data breaches because they're from stealer logs.
Logs from information-stealing malware were leaked multiple times, and if your credentials appear in multiple of those, that's reasonably good evidence that you are doing something wrong.
So I don't think the headline is clickbait, but I do think that the Ars article could be clearer in making its point.
My credentials are in the various leaks, like the Adobe one.
“Login credentials belonging to a Department of Defense contractor, who previously had worked at a government-sponsored media outlet, have appeared in multiple public credential leaks.”
Because it's easier to create and broadcast bait than to filter it.
In the long term HN should do something about it, e.g. editoralized titles.
Actually critisizing DOGE for their major gaffes (like putting up easily defaceable websites, or their incompetence when it comes to reading numbers accurately) is important, but this kind of article is just sad and diminishes the credibility of news journalism
If your password is in the dumps, too, like this person's passwords, then yeah, you might want to look into it.
Indeed the ones getting hacked are more likely to.
"No domains were found for your email address. Whilst your email address was found in a stealer log, no websites were found alongside it. This can be due to the way the log was formatted."
TL;DR: You could try my email in there, believe credentials were stolen, when that might be recycled leak stuffing.
It means the people in the leak had malware on their computer in the past, and maybe present.
Just use a unique complex root password for your password manager and check semi-regularly that it hasn't leaked on haveibeenpwnd.
Bonus points if your password manager automatically checks your stored passwords for leaks and scores them (eg. LastPass)
Everyone I worked with respected OpSec and would never do something as risky as bring in an outside laptop and connect it to the network. DOGE has been so reckless that I believe they wanted to have the system hacked, because seeing our government destroyed is their real objective.
> [...] user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware. Stealer malware typically infects devices through trojanized apps, phishing, or software exploits.
> Lee went on to say that credentials belonging to a Gmail account known to belong to Schutt have appeared in 51 data breaches and five pastes tracked by breach notification service Have I Been Pwned. Among the breaches that supplied the credentials is one from 2013 that pilfered password data for 3 million Adobe account holders, one in a 2016 breach that stole credentials for 164 million LinkedIn users, a 2020 breach affecting 167 million users of Gravatar, and a breach last year of the conservative news site The Post Millennial.
Putting this in undermines the quality of their critique.
I don't disagree, but the reader may show critical thinking and consider that there is more: there is mention of malware, not just a leak.
I’ve logged onto secondary email accounts from PC’s that weren’t mine and could well have been infected. That’s what 2FA is for.
I wouldn’t use a PC which isn’t mine to login to anything sensitive. A password in a leak isn’t evidence of anything.
It’s evidence that your password leaked. What are you on about? You think they just randomly guessed his password?
DOGEs K Schutt's computer infected by malware, credentials found in stealer logs
In fact the story is that at someone point in the past at least in 2013 some credentials of his landed in multiple breaches. Some of my credentials also appear there, this of course means nothing at all about his current account security or the security of the data.
I don't even know what the allegations are. Can you not ever work for a government agency when any account of yours gets compromised? Databreaches aren't that uncommon, presumably many people here have some credentials leaked, do you think these people should be excluded from working jobs in the government?
I don't think anyone really needs to express more at this point.
Buried down the text, they have the plausible deniability disclaimer:
"As Lee notes, the presence of an individual’s credentials in such logs isn’t automatically an indication that the individual himself was compromised or used a weak password. In many cases, such data is exposed through database compromises that hit the service provider. The steady stream of published credentials for Schutt, however, is a clear indication that the credentials he has used over a decade or more have been publicly known at various points."
Of course "credentials have been exposed": the vast majority of sites have been hacked. It doesn't mean this person used the same credentials everywhere, AND that they didn't use 2FA, AND that the credentials matter in the first place. And, of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with malware.
Shame on you ARS for publishing purely speculative posts.
