On Monday, The New York Times reported that U.S. Secret Service agents at the White House were briefly on alert last month when a trusted captain of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) visited the roof of the Eisenhower building inside the White House compound — to see about setting up a dish to receive satellite Internet access directly from Musk’s Starlink service. “Multiple federal agencies are exploring the idea of adopting SpaceX’s Starlink for internet access — and at least one agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done so at the request of Musk’s staff, according to someone who worked at the GSA last month and is familiar with its network operations — despite a vow by Musk and Trump to slash the overall federal budget,” NBC wrote. This time around, the rallying cry of DOGE and White House is “government fraud,” which gives the administration a certain amount of cover for its actions among a base of voters that has long sought to shrink the size and cost of government. Presumably, this is the same counsel who saw no ethical concerns with Musk “donating” Starlink to the White House, or with President Trump summoning the media to film him hawking Cybertrucks and Teslas (a.k.a. “Teslers”) on the White House lawn last week. A message from the White House to fired federal employees at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services instructs recipients to email personal information in a password-protected attachment. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then immediately placed on leave, asking employees to send their Social Security number or date of birth in a password-protected email attachment — presumably with the password needed to view the file included in the body of the email. “Over the weekend, a former senior CIA official showed me the steps by which a foreign adversary who knew only his first name and last initial could have managed to identify him from the single line of the congressional record where his full name was published more than 20 years ago, when he became a member of the Foreign Service,” Harris wrote. “Please provide a password protected attachment that provides your full name, your dates of employment (including date of termination), and one other identifying factor such as date of birth or social security number,” the message reads. Jake Williams, vice president for research and development at the cybersecurity consulting firm Hunter Strategy, told The Times “it’s super rare” to install Starlink or another internet provider as a replacement for existing government infrastructure that has been vetted and secured. The White House press secretary told The Times that Starlink had “donated” the service and that the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office. As Techdirt founder Mike Masnick noted in a recent column “Why Techdirt is Now a Democracy Blog (Whether We Like it or Not),” when the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore: It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent an unencrypted email to the White House with the first names and first letter of the last names of recently hired CIA officers who might be easy to fire. Musk’s unelected role as head of an ad hoc executive entity that is gleefully firing federal workers and feeding federal agencies into “the wood chipper” has seen his Tesla stock price plunge in recent weeks, while firebombings and other vandalism attacks on property carrying the Tesla logo are cropping up across the U.S. and overseas and driving down Tesla sales. The longtime Musk employee who encountered the Secret Service on the roof in the White House complex was Christopher Stanley, the 33-year-old senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at SpaceX. The Trump administration remains dogged by questions about how many — if any — of the DOGE workers were put through the gauntlet of a thorough security background investigation before being given access to such sensitive government databases. 20, President Trump declared that the security clearance process was simply too onerous and time-consuming, and that anyone so designated by the White House counsel would have full top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) clearances for up to six months. If DOGE and the White House were truly interested in trimming government waste, fraud and abuse, they could scarcely do better than consult the inspectors general fighting it at various federal agencies. Both the email to fired CISA workers and DOGE’s ongoing efforts to bypass vetted government networks for a faster Wi-Fi signal are emblematic of this administration’s overall approach to even basic security measures: To go around them, or just pretend they don’t exist for a good reason. But a slightly different version of the same message originally posted to CISA’s website still exists at the website for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which likewise instructs those fired employees who wish to be rehired and put on leave to send a password-protected email attachment with sensitive personal data. President Trump and his attorney general Pam Bondi have dubiously asserted that those responsible for attacks on Tesla dealerships are committing “domestic terrorism,” and that vandals will be prosecuted accordingly. The Washington Post reported last month that Trump’s new FBI director Kash Patel was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a dual U.S. Russian citizen that has made programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories pushed by the Kremlin. On March 13, a Maryland district court judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate more than 130 probationary CISA employees who were fired last month. The White House has also fired at least 100 intelligence staffers from the National Security Agency (NSA), reportedly for using an internal NSA chat tool to discuss their personal lives and politics.
This Cyber News was published on krebsonsecurity.com. Publication date: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 01:30:09 +0000