DOGE teen with access to sensitive data had been fired for 'leaking internal information'

07 February

19 year-old Edward Coristine works for centabillionaire tech CEO Elon Musk as part of his "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE. But before he was hired by the world's wealthiest man, Coristine worked for a cybersecurity firm that fired him for disclosing company secrets.

That's according to a Friday article in Bloomberg, which reported that the Arizona-based firm, Path Network, fired him in June 2022, not long after Coristine graduated from high school. A company executive wrote in an email that "Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors."

"This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this," the Path Network executive wrote.

"I can confirm that Edward Coristine's brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure," a company spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Even though DOGE is not yet an actual federal agency authorized by Congress, DOGE workers like Coristine have managed to gain full access to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which houses federal government's human resources functions, and Treasury Department systems handling $6 trillion in annual payments. The Boston Globe recently reported that Coristine — who is a freshman at Northeastern University — was listed in OPM records as an "expert," suggesting he may have access to millions of federal workers' sensitive personal data.

In posts to gamer-centric messaging platform Discord, Coristine wrote after his firing that he "had access to every single machine" at Path Network and could have wiped all of the company's servers if he wished. However, he said he "never exploited it because it's just not me." Posting under the moniker "Rivage," which several of Bloomberg's sources confirmed was Coristine's username, the 19 year-old insisted he had done "nothing contractually wrong" at the company.

Two federal law enforcement officers told Bloomberg that they are aware of Coristine's posting history, both under the "Rivage" moniker and under the name "JoeyCrafter." The officers said they came across Coristine's posting history while investigating another hacker, though they didn't elaborate as the investigation is still ongoing. Both usernames consistently advocated that hosting platforms like Cloudflare should keep providing online support to controversial websites, including neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer.

Newsweek reported earlier on Friday that Coristine, who is also known online as "Big Balls," manages more than a dozen web domains, including some registered in Russia. One of those websites reportedly offers an AI Discord bot known as "Helfie" that operates in Russia.

"If I was doing the background investigation on him, I would probably have recommended against hiring him for the work he's doing," former FBI agent E.J. Hilbert told WIRED this week. "I'm not opposed to the idea of cleaning up the government. But I am questioning the people that are doing it."

Coristine isn't the only DOGE employee in the spotlight this week: On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that 25 year-old Marko Elez, who was part of the DOGE team that gained administrator-level access to the U.S. Treasury's payment systems that oversee Social Security and Medicare benefits, resigned after he was revealed to have a pseudonymous social media account where he routinely posted racist statements.

On that account, Elez called to "normalize Indian hate," bragged about being "racist before it was cool" and said "you couldn't pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity." On Friday, Vice President JD Vance — whose wife, Usha, is Indian American — called for Elez to be reinstated, arguing: "We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever."

Click here to read Bloomberg's report in full (subscription required).

From Your Site Articles