Source: Kayla Bartkowski / Getty
A 19-year-old teen engineer with a dubious nickname has access to highly sensitive government information, thanks to Elon Musk, and online observers are outraged.
As tech billionaire Elon Musk has directed his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Team to gain access to sensitive federal servers under the premise of cutting government waste, the identities of six prominent technologists have been revealed, among them a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine. Coristine has gained attention due to his nickname, “Big Balls,” and also for having a background that officials state would not have allowed him the clearance to obtain security clearance under normal circumstances.
Coristine, a former student at Northeastern University, was revealed to have worked for the Path Network in 2022, a firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers. Blackhat hackers specialize in cyberwarfare and other computer-based forms of malice. Coristine was also linked to a Telegram account that solicited a cyberattack-for-hire job that year. In addition, he has been linked to the ownership of at least five different companies in the last four years, including one named Tesla.Sexy LLC. The company, according to WIRED, controls dozens of web domains which include two registered in Russia. One of those is still active under the name of Helfie, operating an AI bot targeting Discord servers in the Russian market.
Coristine’s presence on the DOGE team adds more chaos and uncertainty to a situation that has been brewing since last week, with Democratic lawmakers and others expressing concern and outrage over Musk and his team’s unfettered access to information at the US Treasury, USAID, the Social Security Administration, and others. “It’s highly likely they’re improperly accessing, transferring and storing highly sensitive data outside of the environments it was intended to be contained within,” said British cybersecurity expert and hacker Marcus Hutchins in an interview. “If I were a nation like China, Russia, or Iran, I’d be having a field day with a bunch of college kids running around with sensitive federal government data on unencrypted hard drives.” Musk has threatened to shut down the accounts of those on X, formerly Twitter, disclosing more information about him and the other five. This was highlighted in a post by X user Kiera Golden.
https://x.com/KieraGorden/status/1887789677597601914