Not really. The government employs better network security people than the average HN schizo detective.

If something is on their network, they know about it. They have a bigger budget and more bodies to throw at the problem than you believe.

Apparently they do not though.

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The same junior flunkies who would do things like go to government agencies, create administrative accounts, which would then, often with minutes, be seen connecting from Russia and Eastern Europe with the correct credentials.

Source?

> Daniel J. Berulis, a cybersecurity architect with the NLRB, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that within 15 minutes of DOGE team members creating new user credentials and demanding administrative access, multiple login attempts using those exact credentials originated from a Russian IP address

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...

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> often

You have one alleged example.

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I could have this entire conversation with ai too.

You literally asked for a source and when provide by a human it was not enough? Maybe you should rather engage with AI completely then?

It was enough and I appreciated it with the context, and conversation ensued. Not sure why I was scolded for doing so, that's what I meant by being able to have the conversation with AI - this whole interaction is defunct if we're going by the logic that it could be had another way.. I didn't want to go research it myself, I wanted to know where my peers are sourcing this novel-to-me information from.

Maybe the reaction stems from the low effort? "source?" Personally, sometimes I find a short command like this in a discussion forum insulting to my effort. Or maybe it's just that I still like sentences, and others are using text message conversational forms. idk. wtf.

For me it stems from "I could have this entire conversation with ai too."

> The same junior flunkies who would do things like go to government agencies, create administrative accounts, which would then, often with minutes, be seen connecting from Russia and Eastern Europe with the correct credentials.

They are young and think they are very smart. What could go wrong?

For anyone new, the above are talking about trump and Elons DOGE gov department.

There's this interesting Gell-Man amnesia affect when it comes to government employees: everybody assumes that the government as a whole is superbly competent at tasks like cybersecurity because they're the government, but then when folks actually interact with specific government IT employees, they have tons of stories of pure incompetence. I know a number of folks who served in USDS or 18-F, and their descriptions of the career government IT folks and software developers was hilariously bad ("Your first step when interacting with a government employee: figure out how much this person has just completely given up on life"). It makes sense when the very top of the government pay scale (GS-15 step 10 in DC) makes less than a fresh out of college L3 at Google in Silicon Valley. Why would anyone decent work for the government when they pay like that?

Read "This is how they tell me the world ends".

Or let me sum it up for you. The government doesn't have the money to employ top security experts and top security experts don't actually want to work for the government.

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To be fair, the track record for mentally unwell people in positions of trust isn't great.

Before the most recent elections, people voted for an unwell person to lead the country. So it's not just someone can obtain the position, but that people actually chose to put one in office. Twice. Although, it was less well known on the first one.

> unwell person

Do you mean Biden?

> twice

Oh.

"Saw a therapist once" =/= "unwell."

In fact avoiding therapy at all costs is a good sign of trouble.

> In fact avoiding therapy at all costs is a good sign of trouble.

No, its a good sign of actual mental health! Most therapists are pretenders.

The track record for preventing people in positions of trust from seeking out mental health care is terrible. It's just brushing problems under the rug and waiting for them to turn rancid. Don't interpret not seeking help as the nonexistence of a problem, especially if their career depends on it.

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There is no shortage of qualified people with a clean background. And uniquely top talent can be given exceptions, e.g. Kevin Mitnick.

> The government doesn't have the money to employ top security experts and top security experts don't actually want to work for the

To be fair, they had quite a number of security experts on payroll before the current administration laid them all off...

I'd be stunned if they're paying anywhere near enough to attract top talent

Th best folks I know wouldn't touch a government job, no matter the pay.

There was a period of time where it seemed (as an outsider) that they were attracting good talent. This was when Megan Smith was CTO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith.

Dont they usually bargain work against jailtime for domestic cyber criminals?

I applied to USDS in 2023, the process took nearly a year and ended with them just ghosting me after two interview rounds. Pay was capped (by law) below my target salary but at a level that I would accept as it would have been fully remote, but there was also a term limit on the job which meant I would have at most two years in the position.

It’s not just the pay, there’s a lot of structural elements that mean that the potential talent pool is less than desired.

Bruh do you remember snowden? The government is HEAVILY sub-contracted. Accenture? Really? My guy...

And it's right there in the second line of the article:

> One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

Surely a Russian company known for cyberattacks against the US having direct access to the White House network is far more serious than just DDOSing random websites. This is espionage at the highest level. (Again.)

The owner of the proxy is not great, but the fact that its an open door to snoop on everything else on the entire network is the realy fucker there.

>> A compromised device inside the White House network

A whitehouse network. It isn't like everything done in that building run through a single wifi router. It is likely an unprotected network for personal use with zero connecting to anything important.

If the progression of security over the last couple years has made anything clear, it's that letting the barbarians knock down a couple of walls because "well we have more walls" is not a winning defense strategy.

Great, they have some isolated network.

What are the chances it _never_ touches a device with a path to an important computer (e.g., one core router or switch at some point)? Good thing there haven't been any Cisco/Juniper/etc vulnerabilities ever.

What are the chances no important device _ever_ touches this isolated network? No important person ever gets annoyed at the security/filtering on the secured network and decides to connect to the public one instead? The secured one has some sort of issue, so their phone decides to connect to the guest network?

Are they going to compromise the military C&C network in the underground bunker? Probably not.

But it's probably more realistically damaging if they were to compromise some high level staffer's phone and using it as a listening device in a bunch of mid-level Whitehouse meetings.

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