logo
Elon Musk's DOGE Staffer 'Big Balls' Was Involved in Cybercrime Ring

Elon Musk's DOGE Staffer 'Big Balls' Was Involved in Cybercrime Ring

Yahoo26-03-2025

The teenage DOGE employee who went by the online username 'Big Balls' used to run a company that provided tech support to a cybercrime group, according to Reuters.
In 2022, Edward Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services. One of its users was a group of cybercriminals known as EGodly, who openly bragged about stealing phone numbers and cryptocurrency, hacking law enforcement emails in South America and Eastern Europe, cyberstalking an FBI agent in Delaware, and trafficking other stolen data. The group, now retired, even thanked Coristine's company for its support in 2023.
'We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,' the group said. Coristine did not reply to Reuters's request for comment.
It should be alarming that a teen who used to work with a cybercrime group now has wide access to the inner workings of the federal government and the personal information of millions of Americans.
Elon Musk, who has expressed support for Big Balls in the past, has yet to comment.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Ukrainian woman searches for husband lost in action two years ago
Ukrainian woman searches for husband lost in action two years ago

Yahoo

time22 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Ukrainian woman searches for husband lost in action two years ago

By Tom Balmforth CHERNIHIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -When gaunt Ukrainian soldiers dismount from buses as part of prisoner swaps with Russia, Mariia Pylnyk tries to find out anything she can about her missing husband from the freed men, and hopes, just maybe, that he will be among them. Holding up a photograph of Dmytro Pylnyk, lost in action in early 2023, she has many questions. What happened to his unit when it was ambushed by Russian forces? Was he captured by Russia? Could he eventually be released? The mass prisoner swap last month was an opportunity for people like her to ask troops just out of Russian captivity about missing loved ones who they believe, or simply hope, are prisoners of war. The alternative is unthinkable. "I hold out great hope that someone has heard something, seen something," Pylnyk, 29, told Reuters at a recent exchange in May, flanked by other relatives of those missing in action. "My son and I are waiting for (his) dad to come home. Hope dies last. God willing, it'll all be okay and dad will come back." Precise numbers for soldiers missing in action are not made public. For Ukrainians, and for Russians on the other side of the conflict, it can be hard to find out even basic information. Pylnyk says she has written to government agencies and Russian authorities and learned almost nothing. Ukrainian officials say more than 70,000 Ukrainians have been registered missing since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. The majority are from the military but the figure also includes civilians. Another 12,000 have been removed from the list after being identified among the dead or returned in exchanges. Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for the Coordination Council that arranges prisoner swaps from the Ukrainian side, said Russia had never notified Kyiv which soldiers it is holding prisoner. Ukraine collects that data by other means as best it can, he said. Pylnyk and others like her share information in online chat groups and use it to try to piece together what happened. "Misfortune brought us together," she said. "After two years of this, we're like a family." LAST PHONE CALL Dmytro Pylnyk, an electrician by trade, was drafted into the army in late 2022. He phoned home often so that his wife did not worry but last called on their son Artem's third birthday on Feb. 27, 2023. He was deployed from Kharkiv region towards Bakhmut, a small city that later fell to Russian forces after fierce fighting. His unit's convoy was caught in a Russian ambush, Mariia Pylnyk said she had learned. "The guys ran any which way," she said, citing conversations with commanders who told her 41 soldiers were missing in action. Two were captured and have since been released. One, who was freed in an exchange at Easter and had lost both his arms, was unable to share any valuable information, she said. The second refused to talk. The pace of prisoner swaps has increased in the last month. Ukraine and Russia each released 1,000 prisoners in a three-day exchange last month, the only tangible outcome of direct talks in Istanbul. A prisoner swap of under-25s on Monday was the first in a series of exchanges also expected to include each side repatriating the remains of thousands. Mariia Pylnyk has given her son's DNA to the authorities so that if Dmytro is confirmed killed in action they will be notified. "We all understand that this is war and anything is possible. But to this day, I don't believe it and I don't feel that he is dead. I feel like he's alive and God willing he'll return," she said. NO SIGNAL TO CALL She lives with Artem, now five, in Pakul, a village in the northern Chernihiv region that was briefly occupied by Russians. She has not told Artem his father is missing in action. "He knows that dad is a soldier, dad is a good man, dad is at work and just doesn't have any signal to call," she said. She takes comfort from seeing families reunited and never allows herself to cry in front of her son. She used to work in a shop, but Artem has often been ill. The angst of the last two years have taken their toll on her health too. She receives state support. Pylnyk has vowed to find her husband but has often not had time to attend prisoner swaps while looking after their son. "Only a weakling can give up, you know, throw up their hands and say that's it, he's not there," she said, adding that she was very emotional when she attended last month's big exchange. "When I was there, the fighting spirit awoke in me that I needed. I have to do this. Who else will do it but me?"

Uncle Elon's final report card
Uncle Elon's final report card

Business Insider

time32 minutes ago

  • Business Insider

Uncle Elon's final report card

All good buddy comedies come to an end. For President Donald Trump and first friend "Uncle Elon" Musk, theirs wrapped up with the same explosive fanfare upon which it started. But now their shared enthusiasm for cutting government waste has morphed into animosity for each other so deep and personal that it's become a textbook case study in management gone wrong. In November, just after Trump's reelection, I asked management experts if Musk could mimic his track record of juicing everything he could out of his lean companies to make the government run more efficiently. They were reluctant to doubt Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, but just as reluctant to think his efficiency tactics at Tesla and X meant he could single-handedly transform the government. I checked back in with some of them in March, six weeks into DOGE's chaotic tenure, after it dismantled USAID and axed tens of thousands of federal workers. They described his management as "clumsy," "wrongheaded," and full of "political recklessness." Now, the breakup of the bromance between two of the world's biggest, boldest personalities is surprising only in that it took so long to unfold and, once it did, moved with the speed that only two social media savvy, chronically online posters could propel. (Musk posted on X more than a dozen times lambasting Trump and his " Big Beautiful Bill" late last week, since deleting some of the most disparaging claims, and Trump suggested Musk might be suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome.") If DOGE is a cautionary tale in how not to manage, it's one from the furthest extreme, marked by a clash between the egos of two of the world's most powerful men that made politics extremely personal. Still there are business lessons to be gleaned even for those of us who run fewer than six companies and have fewer than 220 million social media followers. DOGE has proved "unsuccessful" up to this point, and is so far a "failed venture" for Musk and for the government, says Subodha Kumar, a professor at Temple University's Fox School of Business. It brought "disruption, a lot of delays, a lot of mistrust, and a lot of good people have left the organization," he says. "This kind of damage takes a long time to repair." To date, DOGE has claimed it found $180 billion in savings (Musk in May called DOGE "effective," but "not as effective as I'd like," as the original goal was to save $2 trillion). An analysis in April from nonpartisan research group Partnership for Public Service found that the department's actions could cost as much as $135 billion, an estimate of the costs of the firings, re-hirings, and lost productivity. Meanwhile, the four months Musk spent working taking a chainsaw to the federal government are wrapping up doused in drama that has spilled over to his other companies. After his 130-day post as a special government employee ends, Musk is pointing the blame for government waste back on Trump, skewering the spending bill for being too big and ugly, and endorsing a call to impeach Trump and replace him with Vice President JD Vance (that post has since been deleted). The lesson here is akin to that of two mob bosses of the gangster world who both crave the superior distinction of being the number one boss. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management leadership professor The escalating tension is just the beginning of a fight that could get worse for Musk, and likely has little benefit for Trump, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management leadership professor who has studied Trump for decades and advised presidents, tells me in an email. DOGE, he notes, overpromised savings and may actually cost US taxpayers more when it comes to rehiring costs, repairing systems, and weakened cybersecurity. As WIRED reported last week, DOGE is hiring, and even has reached out to technologists who formerly worked for the government. Musk's involvement with the DOGE proved tumultuous for his businesses from the start. His personal wealth ballooned by some $200 billion in 2024, surpassing $400 billion after Election Day. Once he got to work in the White House, his absenteeism from his companies — paired with a growing distaste for DOGE's actions among the electorate and protests targeting Tesla — led his net worth to drop alongside Tesla's market cap. Last Thursday, Musk's open beef with Trump further hampered his wealth, leading the Tesla CEO to lose $34 billion personally in a single day. Tesla stock, which has taken a beating as people turn on the company to protest Musk's government work, took its biggest tumble since March, closing 14% lower and wiping out $152 billion from the company's market cap. Musk is still the richest person in the world. For Musk, there's damage to the Tesla brand in need of repair. His next step could be "to portray himself as a purist who came in to offer his technical help and didn't realize how deep the corruption runs," says Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School. "Musk could potentially portray himself as a wayward son of the tech industry." This might only work if the Trump administration continues to stumble, and if Musk also sees more success, like winning big with his robotaxi push. As Taylor Lorenz reported in User Mag Friday, some high-profile Democrats are already signaling that they would welcome Musk back into the fold. Trump over the weekend told NBC News Musk would face "serious consequences" if he donated to Democratic candidates (he did not specify what they would be). It's yet to be seen where Musk will find his next political alliances: On Friday, he ran a poll on X asking if a third political party should emerge to include the 80% of Americans in the middle of Republicans and Democrats, as he sees it. The president has threatened to go after Musk's government contracts — which total in tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX and Tesla. "The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Elon was 'wearing thin,' I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!" Trump himself bought a Tesla just three months ago, and is now considering selling it. (Best of luck to him, the cars' resale values have tanked). As Trump and Musk part ways, it's clear that Musk's brazen, fully autonomous leadership style didn't work in the government world, as it eschewed transparency and collaboration in favor of a top-down approach. "The one-size-fits-all policy does not work everywhere," says Kumar. "You have to understand the culture of the organization and you have to work from inside rather than from outside." Back in November, experts told me it wasn't clear what authority Musk would actually wield in the newly-created position to implement massive spending cuts. Trying to employ tech-world leadership tactics from the White House created a rivalry between Musk and Trump for power and control, undercutting the alliance between the two and leaving DOGE far short of its savings goals. "The lesson here is akin to that of two mob bosses of the gangster world who both crave the superior distinction of being the number one boss — with surging parallel drives for grandiosity," Sonnenfeld says. "Musk's tragic mistake was that he forgot his role — as a staffer and advisor to Trump, not the primary character he foolishly believed himself to be, and even now, continues to overestimate his own importance and indispensability."

LA stands up to ICE raids. What about Boston?
LA stands up to ICE raids. What about Boston?

Boston Globe

time36 minutes ago

  • Boston Globe

LA stands up to ICE raids. What about Boston?

In fact, Boston activists did rally on Monday in an act coordinated by Service Employees International Union members in support of David Huerta, a prominent labor and civil rights leader in California and SEIU United Service Workers West president, who Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Related : Advertisement 'When somebody is violently detained as David [Huerta] was — arrested and detained — we're going to stand up and make our voices heard. This is bringing it all to a new level,' Kevin Brown, executive vice president of SEIU 32BJ, told me in an interview before the Monday rally. SEIU 32BJ — which represents more than 185,000 members in a dozen states, including 21,000 in Massachusetts and Rhode Island — calls itself the largest immigrant-majority union membership in the country. Advertisement 'Of course, it's not just about David … this is about the ICE raids, and this is about a fundamental attack on democracy,' Brown said. 'When you mobilize 2,000 National Guard [members], you threaten to bring in the Marines over the objections of the governor and the mayor. ... Yeah, this is pretty bad.' Lucy Pineda, a longtime activist and founder and director of the nonprofit Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts, has been documenting ICE activity daily on social media primarily in Chelsea, East Boston, Everett, and Lynn. '¿Hasta cuándo el pueblo se va a levantar?' When will the people rise up?, Pineda's voice was emotional when she picked up my call Monday morning as she told me about a heart-wrenching ICE raid in Lynn Advertisement ICE's activity in LA seemingly signals a new phase in Trump's immigration crackdown, one that local advocates have been bracing for: workplace raids. To be sure, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the force behind Trump's immigration plans, has reportedly put pressure on ICE leaders to ' 'What do you mean you're going after criminals?' That flood has begun. But so has the resistance. 'We've been preparing for this level of activity from the Trump administration since he was elected in November,' Brown said. 'We will absolutely do everything that we can lawfully engage in to protect our members' rights.' Advertisement 'Americans are stunned,' David Leopold, an immigration lawyer and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. 'What they voted for was a secure border. What they got is a full-on military-style assault on immigrants.' Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store