this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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Summary

A vulnerability in the new OPM email server allowed anyone to send mass messages to federal employees, exposing poor cybersecurity.

Over 13,000 NOAA staff received spam and vulgar messages, including crude jokes about Trump and bizarre newsletters, causing widespread outrage.

The breach resulted from an overhaul led by Elon Musk that installed underqualified personnel and an insecure in-house system, sparking a class-action lawsuit for cybersecurity failures.

The unsecured system also inadvertently revealed ties to Project 2025 and a plan to gather government employee data as Trump’s loyalists reshape federal operations.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 14 hours ago

And true to form, our boy Klip exposed the malignant incompetence while taking the opportunity to advertise his substack 😄

[–] [email protected] 98 points 15 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 178 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

They can't even do a coup without fucking half of it up.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Because they don't have to worry about fuck ups. Americans are gonna do jack shit about it. Otherwise something would have already been done.

[–] [email protected] 97 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (6 children)

That's the frightening part .... either they are idiots that are completely messing everything up including their own plans ... or they are following a well orchestrated plan of disruption and chaos to gain control of everything and everyone

Either way, they are undoing a lot of things that will take years or decades to bring back

"From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day."

  • Will Durant
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

It's much easier to fight a enemy that is confused, disorganized, and fighting amongst itself. This is by design.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

they are idiots that are completely messing everything up including their own plans

Incompetence is one of the hallmark qualities of a fascist government.

[–] CitizenKong 12 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Hey, people think Hitler's Germany was a success story until he started to loose the war but it was actually a clusterfuck right from the beginning and doomed to fail from the start.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

I mean, he loosed war pretty early, so it wasn't that long according to what you say.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 hours ago

Now now... incompetence is the hallmark of any government

[–] Itdidnttrickledown 4 points 9 hours ago

I'm betting on stage 1 underpants gnomes.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 16 hours ago

Just wait until all the backdoors are discovered. Or front doors I guess...with how inept these idiots are. Can't wait for someone with some power/money to actually get sick of these clowns and just end them

[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart 14 points 14 hours ago

Either way, they are undoing a lot of things that will take years or decades to bring back

This is what the accelerationists didn’t account for.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 15 hours ago

"Flood the zone with shit" strategy.

[–] Hobbes_Dent 99 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

The breach resulted from an overhaul led by Elon Musk that installed underqualified personnel and an insecure in-house system, sparking a class-action lawsuit for cybersecurity failures.

And y’all let him have access to government.

The world will burn from climate and war because of American stupidity.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

They rigged the vote and Trump threw him in there. How did WE do this exactly?

[–] PugJesus 60 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

As much as I wish otherwise, Trump got a plurality of the vote, and pre-election day polling was clear that such a result was very possible.

The plurality of the people who bothered to vote put Trump in, who was quite clear about his alliance with Musk.

This is on us.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I mean it is worth noting the added legal schenanegins that are known.

https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f

[–] [email protected] 31 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Even if some form of manipulation or shenanigans pushed Trump over the edge, it couldn't have done that if it hadn't been close to begin with. It shouldn't have been close.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

That I cannot disagree with... Will 100% agree that flaws were made with... (in no particular order)

  1. Voters not actually researching until it was too late. The amount of trump voters posting "what do you mean tarrifs will raise prices on stuff". and amount that were searching "what is a tarrif", stories of actual trump supporters that literally are getting deported etc... There's absolutely a lot of trump voters, that wouldn't have voted it if they took the time to understand what trump was literally openly saying he'd do... and did.

  2. Non voters... IE via apathy or disagreements on the democratic party. Be it over just lazyness, or to try and get the democratic party to represent them better... the end result is now it's going to take years of work whenever power is taken just to bring the country back to where it was a month ago... let alone improve it in the ways they wanted.

  3. The democratic party. Honestly there's 2 pretty blaring mistakes IMO in this campaign... starting with bypassing the primary, covering up Biden's senility and letting him re-run. Rushing the flip to harris with now no primary or system in place of letting anyone chose our candidate... Then some major misteps on the harris campaign, which I felt was doing amazing early on... making solid steps solid grabs, minor misstep in refusing to criticize or draw a strong contrast between herself and biden., climbing in the polls... Before suddenly making a hard right turn on messaging. Courting the unobtainable red voters instead of focusing on motivating her own base to get out and vote.

I agree, trump is awful enough, that this should have been a slam dunk. the fact that this was ever anywhere close is an embarasment to the country as a whole constantly.

That being said... it still sucks that there's a very good chance that even through those flaws, there's still reason to question if we had won by a few percent... because honestly the potential of a small scale sabatoge (IE one to drop a few percent of votes rather than just outright change the machines and do it in bulk), would just be a 4th factor to add to that list.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

The Democratic party is guilty of nothing less than total political malpractice from the moment they allowed Biden to run again.

[–] TrickDacy 8 points 12 hours ago

"us" being "a bunch of apathetic idiots and idiots deeply opposed to the rest of the country"

[–] TropicalDingdong -1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

We can put a significant amount of blame in the laps of Democrats (as in, DNC officials) and their sycophants and defenders in both media and online.

Lemmy itself worked to become an echo chamber reflecting an uncritical assessment of both Democrat performance from 2021-2024, and as well the legitimate electoral performance of both the Biden, and separately, the Harris campaign.

Reality: the denialism around how bad and unpopular both Biden and Harris were in their role as Executives in Cheif, did substantial damage to Harris and probably cost them the election.

That denialism was RAMPANT across lemmy, and still persists today.

You can not make a convincing argument that your team should be the ones elected when you are asking people to deny the evidence of their lives experience, and that's exactly what both the Biden and Harris campaign did. Lemmy moderators also worked to suppress any media or users critical of Harris and Biden.

Harris needed to feel the pressure from the electorate that Americans sensed that the country wasn't doing well and was going in the wrong direction. She needed to understand and respond to the fact that Americans, in general, wanted a change from how Democrats had been managing.

Building an echo chamber, in both mainstream media and social media, to shut that view point out, and ultimately leave it unaddressed, is why the Harris campaign failed.

That echo chamber shielded the campaign from critical information they needed to be aware of to make the right kinds of changes which might have led to success.

And every moderator here, who suppressed criticism, or who uses bans to create an echo chamber in forums like c/World, c/Politics, and c/PoliticalMemes is in part to blame.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Even now I routinely get hammered with downvotes when I say "Harris wasn't a good candidate."

I mean, elections are how you judge whether a candidate is a good candidate. We have an objective measure of how good a candidate she was. It wasn't very.

I'm not sure what better candidate the Democrats could have fielded by the time Biden withdrew, but that just shows that Biden waited way too late to drop out.

The Democrats are masters at pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.

[–] TropicalDingdong 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I think the key here is that Harris could have been a better candidate, and at certain points, especially before the convention, she was a better candidate.

She specifically and intentionally pivoted away from the politics that work for the Democratic party, Democratic Socialism, and towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, a politics that doesn't work for the Democratic party. It was cheerleaded by many here on Lemmy, and when told that this wouldn't work, that it was harmful to her electoral chances, that they were pivoting to a non-existent center, we were called bots, schills, fascists, communists, armchair activists (although many of us making these criticisms, like myself have litterally put in thousands of hours into political campaigns). The briggading, the trolling, the abuse, the gaslighting: moderators and some very prevalent posters here on Lemmy were directly responsible, if not complicit. It was structural, and moderation abuse allowed it to happen and allows it to persist. And while it's not unique to Lemmy (the same process was happening on Reddit), this is our house and we are collectively responsible for the outcomes that happen here.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Yep, she dropped out before Iowa because she was polling this badly when she ran for President in her own right. So yeah:

  • no primary (Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson would not have been the only candidates if there was a competitive primary).
  • everyone in the media just throwing away their credibility by claiming Biden was a young spring chicken, despite us seeing him have senior moments on the regular.
  • gaslighting people about the economy (inflation is down, wages went up, stock market is up). Sure, those metrics were all technically correct, but all of those were skewed by the high end of the income scale, and the average person was still worse off than before. I don't think Biden could've done a lot more besides manhandling Manchin and Sinema to get a higher minimum wage passed and renewing the child tax credit, but at least be honest about this and acknowledge that there's more to be done, and have done plans about what you'll do about it in a next term.
  • all those previous things (and you could add more stuff to that, like Gaza and the tiktok ban), that were obvious to anyone with eyes, and destroyed the credibility of all mainstream media when they talked about project 2025 and Trump being the next Hitler (again, true things, but you need credibility to get through to people).
  • wasn't helped by Kamala running around with the most unpopular politician around that isn't liked by Democrats or Republicans, and her unwillingness to draw any contrast with Biden in a change election where he's underwater in the polls.

The people running her campaign committed malpractice, and because of the 2 party system, it's but like voters can vote for another party without throwing away their vote (which they still should've done outside of the swing states, but the left again didn't have their shit together and the whole thing was a shitshow with Cornell West wasting everyone's time running for a Greens nomination he wasn't going to get).

[–] Couldbealeotard 11 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Unless you are suggesting that actual election fraud took place, these guys got democratically elected.

From the outside it seems like this is what the majority of your voting public wanted, and the majority of your adult population were fine with it and chose not to vote. If it were the first time I would consider it as revealing a major flaw in your political system, but this is the second time, non consecutively, that this has happened. That just looks like this is representative of your people. Sorry.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It is. Im tired of people making excuses for the idiots in this country. Idgaf if you thought the Democrats were terrible- theyre clearly far better than these fascists. But enough people decided it wasn't worth their time anyhow.

Fuck them and fuck all of us because this is who we are.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

You're not wrong.

Imagine if the Dems won and we never experienced this timeline, and it was another boring and mediocre administration.

Then it would have just postponed the inevitable.

It's the "what have you done for me lately, Eddy?". The last election was "super duper important guys trust us". And it absolutely was. And it was a remarkably average presidency. And that's a good thing.

The majority of the people either have absolutely no understanding of how our government actually functions in the real world (and this includes both the people saying "why aren't the Dems doing anything" and the people who said "vote third party"), or actually want to watch the world burn.

Basically, they FAFO'd. They had their fun in the first half, and now they've got us all trapped in the second half.

There is no way within the system as it stands now to even begin to turn towards normalcy for at least two years.

Buckle up, kids.

And I hope nobody tries to off Trump. As bad as it is, that would definitely just make things worse. Just check out the order of succession.

The order of succession

How far down would they have to go before things start to look better? Best we can do is to just hope some other global power pities us enough to send a mercy nuke to DC.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 hours ago

You sound like a trump supporter. No, really, exactly like them. And you're no different.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

But her emails!?

Just to clarify, i'm talking about Musk. :)

[–] dhork 10 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Stop misgendering Elon!

The correct exclamation in this case is Butt Tizzy Males, not Buttery Males

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

The Eo about gender made everyone a female.

[–] Rhoeri 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I wonder how much of the intended damage he wants us to suffer is going to be mitigated as a result of their incompetence, and then I wonder how long can we count on them to continue making these mistakes before people begin to get seriously hurt…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

People have already died from their actions. 2 plane crashes and counting.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It's been 4 days.
How did people get these email addresses?
I mean, the domain is known.
But was the system that president musk broke really holding back this torrent of abuse and garbage?
Feels like actual email addresses were leaked.
Unless it was a mailing list that was suddenly exposed.

Still seems strange that an email that simply says "yo" suddenly came through as part of the spam.
Feels like email addresses were posted somewhere, and someone jumped on for the lulz. Along with the wall of trolls and abusers jumping on.

I mean, as soon as I link a domain to an IP, I see all sorts of "security" scans turn up. Till then, firewall is pretty quiet.
And if I wildcard direct a domain to an ip, the root gets scanned but any sub domains don't.
I feel email addresses would follow a similar pattern.

[–] MrEff 38 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

It's worse than you think. Last week we got an email that looked like strait up fishing spam demanding that we were to email back "yes" confirming that we got the email. So many people even reported it as spam that we had supervisors have to directly tell us that it was legit. Then they sent out a second email with a warning that is was in fact legit and to respond to that email with "yes" if we got that one.

On the back end at OPM: Musk forced his way in and demanded to redo the email servers. The IT told him it wasn't possible for what he was asking. So he brought in his own goons to install a non government server with unknown software and unknown security configurations and they plugged it into the OPM network to spoof it as an official OPM server, then sent out those emails.

And sure enough, the idiot didn't didn't configure the security correctly or let official government IT people touch it, it ended up backdooring into the entire government HR system, and it had every active government email that responded "yes" to his stupid email that we were required to. And now we know it was compromised. There is no telling what foreign governments now have all of that info as well as what other backdoors they have installed.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Holy shit.
That's some shit that contravenes every security briefing, every security best practice.
Then they go and spoof a legit government installation with their own bullshit?!
Fucking Hilary and her email servers. But like times 10. Legitimately compromising the US government communications.
Why is this lawsuits, why isn't this treason?!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 12 hours ago

This is way worse than Hillary's email servers.

Hillary occasionally conducted government business on an email servers owned by her, but also on her (not .gov) domain.

I never knew the details. But I wouldn't doubt that for simplicity sake they probably had multiple accounts configured on the same phone. At that point, it's incredibly easy to accidentally respond or start a chain from the wrong address. Who among us hasn't done that, we actually grew up with this stuff.

What Musk did was set up his own separate infrastructure to send and receive emails, on a .gov domain, and use that server, as a private contractor to the president, to circumvent tons of critical processes and security practices, in order to push his clients agenda.

The point of that agenda is to nip checks-and-balances in the balls so the president can unilaterally enact "his" (or the highest bidders...Heritage, Musk, Thiel, Federalists, Illuminati, Skull and Bones, whatever, at this point it's all the same) agenda.

It. Is. Actual. Treason.

By an illegal immigrant, no less.

[–] dhork 13 points 15 hours ago

why isn't this treason?!

Because Musk bought the election for Trump, and now Musk do whatever he wants.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

But her emails...