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CISA tries to contain data leak
- m3047 6mo agoCISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” Oh wow. Except for those secrets.
- InsideOutSanta 6mo agoExcept for all the leaked data, absolutely no data was leaked.
- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo agoSee the trick is to not consider your data sensitive, no SENSITIVE data was leaked.
- Terr_ 6mo agoThere is no data leakage from the application where the front-fell-off, because we towed the data outside the environment. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago‘Logs do not indicate hackers access any sensitive data, because we did not implement logging and did not look very hard for auxiliary evidence’
- shakna 6mo agoWell, "Sensitive" is the second lowest data label. It must all just be above that.
- unethical_ban 6mo agoDidn't RTFA, was any actual secret data or any IOC, log tampering, etc. found?
- bandrami 6mo agoUnfortunately "sensitive" has a specific meaning that they may be being legalistic with. PII, for example, is generally not "sensitive".
- oofbey 6mo agoWillful ignorance. "No indication" meaning they haven't seen any evidence anything was compromised. Could be because they've been working very hard not to look at any evidence or analysis of what happened. "I'm not aware of X" is very different from "X is not true".
- stephbook 6mo agoThey probably don't have systems in place to even detect that data was snorkeled off. So "no indication" is completely correct.
- fragmede 6mo ago> “Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.” More competent technical control means a random contractor doesn't have passwords from mid-2025 to copy to their home machine that even still work after 30 days, if not 5.
- xoa 6mo agoThis. In fact I thought the government had long since gotten pretty serious about using smartcards and HSMs for everything? Why let anyone take any sort of accessible credential at all vs handing out hardware they can use but that cannot have the credentials taken off? At some organizations the extra cost would be a concern of course but that wouldn't be the case here. Or maybe that'd have been the sort of project and standard CISA would have formerly done before the Republicans gutted it last year I guess, and this is just another symptom of rot? But yeah to your point technology certainly can absolutely help with this sort of thing. It's not some inevitable act of nature.
- acdha 6mo agoI think you have to look at it against the backdrop of so many people being fired and new employees being tasked with “urgent” projects across the government. It’s very plausible that the people who used to enforce all of the policies which would’ve preceded or contained this were either fired for political reasons or didn’t think they could tell someone to follow policy if it slowed them down.
- andrewflnr 6mo agoI worked for a bit in an org that was agglomerated into CISA. Let's just say PKI integration continues to be infeasibly difficult for most projects, especially small ones. (And cost is very, very much a concern. Be honest, do you want your taxes going into a project where it isn't?)
- niwtsol 6mo agoWhat an egregious mistake. "exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository" - isn't is git 101 to not put creds in git? What pattern do they think this is consistent with?
- apnorton 6mo agoThey're not defending it as an established workflow pattern or some kind of best practice. The usage of "exhibit a pattern consistent with..." is just describing what it looks like the repository was used for. i.e. it's not a set of government sourcecode for an internal project, it's not something indicative of intentionally leaking large amounts of data, etc.
- nkrisc 6mo ago> What pattern do they think this is consistent with? They clearly stated what pattern this usage is consistent with: using it as a sort of personal scratch pad. You’re assigning more meaning to the statement than there is. They are simply stating an observation.
- irishcoffee 6mo agoIf I had a dollar for the amount of secrets committed to public repositories I could probably retire. No, that isn’t an excuse. Pretending the US govt isn’t made up of people just like you or I is quite silly.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Arubis 6mo agoIf I had a dollar for each secret I’ve committed to a public repo, I could probably buy a couple of sandwiches. I’m not smarter and my opsec probably isn’t any better than most old devs, but I also don’t have a treasure trove of government secrets on disk and—crucially!—_I would make different decisions if did_. The nuance here: when I’ve slipped and committed secrets, it’s typically a relative nothing burger: most common case is API keys to some third-party service. I’ve worked across a bunch of regulated industries and, within those, not caused a breach—because being in that space you know to be more careful, and because the companies in those spaces (wisely!) tend to support good security practices, more so than the industry average.
- Cider9986 6mo agoMaybe Massie was right when he didn't want to fund CISA.
- water-data-dude 6mo agoMaybe this is what happens when you fill roles based on loyalty to one person rather than competence
- imglorp 6mo agoIt's almost like gutting the agency of experts diminishes their opsec capacity among many others. In 2020 Chris Krebs contradicted stolen election claims. In 2025, Trump sacked Krebs and revoked his clearance, leaving CISA without a director. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs In March 2025, the cuts began. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-staffers-amid-ongoing-federal-cuts https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-st... In 2026, it was still without a director and running on fumes. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/us-cybersecurity-agency-cisa-reportedly-in-dire-shape-amid-trump-cuts-and-layoffs https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/us-cybersecurity-agency-ci... This activity is consistent with intentionally weakening a country's defenses from within and sowing chaos.
- wnevets 6mo agoIf a foreign adversary was in charge would we know the difference?
- subscribed 6mo agoExactly. He's a Putin asset. Everything he does is either enriching himself and his ilk, or helping Putin. It's staggering the country is just looking at him.
- bink 6mo agoKrebs was fired in 2020, not 2025.
- imglorp 6mo agoCorrect, thank you, I can't edit now though. Fired in 2020, clearance revoked in 2025.
- andrewflnr 6mo agoLet's be real, it's more directly consistent with aggressive incompetence and hiring/firing based on loyalty. As for how the relevant fools ended up with the power to hire or fire, I'll grant that's a more complicated question...
- 0x59 6mo agoReminds me of the enshittification of public transit. Reduce funding, service level decreases, negative sentiment follows. Eventually, paths like that may lead to increased privatization through security contractors.
- mrtesthah 6mo agoIt was a security contractor who leaked the creds. So this is already the increased privatization end-game.
- pooooka 6mo agoReduced funding has nothing to do with degraded service. MTA is one of the worlds most expensive public transit systems and 15-20% of it's 21 billion dollar budget is being consumed by debt. The term enshittification, in my view, is just a progressive catch phrase for systemantics. Any system grows to fill its known universe and as it grows it operates in unpredictable ways. And the unseen changes dictate what the system really does (not it's job title). MTA is not here to be your public transportation. It's job is to generate massive debt for investment bankers on wall street who get paid through nefarious interest swap agreements. And how many other city metro's are operating under the same investment banking schemes? From what I could tell LA, Denver, Phili, Detroit and (up until recently) Chicago.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago> CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions
- fhn 6mo agoLawmakers want answers but they never provide answers themselves. Who watches the so-called watchers? Corruption on a massive scale on by lawmakers but when a key gets published, heads will roll? Keys are mistakenly published all the time by very smart people. Ever ran rm -rf *? Every destroy a production db? Ever power off the wrong server? Yes.
- verisimi 6mo agoTheir watching is about control not care. It is covertly adversarial; "care" is a justification, not the reality.
- omgJustTest 6mo agoSeems senators had questions about why CISA was scaling back efforts related to election security[1]. Tulsi's resignation today seems interestingly timed to when this became public. [1]https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padilla-warner-demand-gabbard-intel-officials-brief-senate-on-election-security-after-fulton-county-raid/ https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padil...
- da_chicken 6mo agoI don't know why US senators are up in arms about this. Trump was extremely clear when he gave them his budget that he wanted CISA's budget drastically cut. He also specifically directed CISA to shut down their election security office. This is the "who killed Hannibal" meme. If Padilla and Warner didn't know about this, then they're incompetent themselves. Especially because they reported on it last year: https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/news-coverage/cnn-trump-is-dismantling-election-security-networks-state-officials-are-alarmed/ https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/news-coverage/cnn-tr... Why did you forget this happened, Padilla?
- N2yhWNXQN3k9 6mo ago> Why did you forget this happened, Padilla? because behind any senator there is a propaganda team, not a brain
- tardedmeme 6mo agoIt takes brains to run successful propaganda.
- mapt 6mo agoIt takes brains to run propaganda that successfully changes minds. Propaganda that just confirms preexisting mass delusions is actually pretty easy to run if you have a lot of support from similar actors running adjacent campaigns.
- deleted 6mo ago
- bandrami 6mo agoI remember when they leaked a million SF-86s. You know, the form we fill out with a ton of highly personal information so they can decide if we can be trusted with sensitive data.
- browsingonly 6mo agoThat wasn't a leak, it was a breach (perpetrated by Chinese state security).
- dgacmu 6mo agoWasn't that OPM, not CISA?
- acquacow 6mo agoYeah, that was OPM...twice.
- bandrami 6mo agoYes, multiple times IIRC (my "they" was more general than a specific agency) CISA, however, was the administration whose head was caught using an unauthorized commercially-hosted LLM for government data a few months ago: https://cyberpress.org/cisa-public-chatgpt/ https://cyberpress.org/cisa-public-chatgpt/
- pianopatrick 6mo agoIf these guys who are supposed to be the experts cannot really be secure on the internet, I'm not sure how anyone else is supposed to be secure on the internet.
- quantified 6mo agoThis is post-Doge. Doge did its thing well. Sadly, a lot of other people parrotted Doge's lies.
- immanuwell 6mo agothe real kicker here isn't just the leaked aws govcloud keys - it's that a contractor manually disabled github's secret scanning protection
- iluvcommunism 6mo ago[dead]