One of Elon Musk's DOGE Kids Reportedly Helped a Cybercrime Ring
The teenage Department of Government Efficiency employee who goes by the online moniker of — no, we are not kidding — "Big Balls" once helped out a serious cybercrime ring, Reuters reports.
In 2022, when he was still in high school, the now 19-year-old Edward Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided a type of web service known as a content delivery network. One of its users was a website belonging to a group of cybercriminals known as "EGodly," which openly bragged about trafficking stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent. (DiamondCDN probably attracted the hacking outfit because its website promised it had "no business inspecting user content.")
Ruthless hackers they may be, the "EGodly" blackhats were courteous enough to let Coristine know just how much they appreciated his company's help.
"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 cybercriminal ring wrote in a Telegram message, as quoted by Reuters.
Coristine, and his irreverent nickname, have become emblematic of Elon Musk's DOGE effort to blitzkrieg the federal government with next to no oversight. Plenty of scrutiny has been cast on the qualifications of its extraordinarily young staff, who are nonetheless being granted alarming access to sensitive federal systems, with high positions in government to boot. Coristine, for instance, is listed as a "senior adviser" at the State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Reuters found.
Seemingly, little has been done to vet these arch-auditors. One resigned — and then was rehired — after his incredibly racist tweets surfaced. Another, it was discovered, professionally sold ketamine. Coristine himself was once fired by a cybersecurity firm for leaking its company secrets.
Now you can add another skeleton to Coristine's formidable closet. The cybercriminal group that his firm provided services to, EGodly, has claimed that it's stolen crypto, hijacked phone numbers, and broken into law enforcement email accounts in Latin America and Eastern Europe. These claims couldn't be independently verified by Reuters.
What is verifiable, however, was that the group targeted a former FBI agent who it believed was investigating them. It began by digging up and sharig personal information on the agent, like where he lived, according to Reuters. Eventually, one member filmed themselves driving past his house, screaming "EGodly says you're a bitch!"
According to the former agent, the FBI was investigating Egodly because of its connection to swatting, or calling in a fake emergency so that law enforcement send a heavily armed team to a location.
"These are bad folks," the former FBI agent said. "They're not a pleasant group."
While it doesn't appear that Coristine was deeply involved with the group, that this suspect part of his history seemingly didn't preclude him from tampering with federal systems should be alarming.
"This stuff was not in the distant past," Nitin Natarajan, who served as the deputy director of CISA under president Joe Biden, told Reuters. "The recency of the activity and the types of groups he was associated would definitely be concerning."
More on DOGE: The Guy Who Predicted the 2008 Crash Issues Warning About Elon Musk Torpedoing Federal Spending
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