Last week, while many of us were enjoying the last days of summer, a whistleblower disclosed shocking details indicating staffers with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been messing with Americans’ most sensitive data. According to the whistleblower, DOGE staffers uploaded the entire catalogue of Social Security numbers — as well as individuals’ full names, birth dates and addresses — to an unauthorized online storage system that bypassed the agency’s standard security and oversight protocols.
This scandal may lack the pizzazz of the personality-driven dramas that dominate our current political moment. But its implications are difficult to overstate. The consequences of Social Security number theft are devastating. Bad actors can use these stolen numbers to run up debts in their victims’ names, worm their way into bank accounts, steal government benefits and unlock even more private data. Social Security numbers are such a coveted tool for fraudsters that, according to one study, their presence in a cache of stolen data increases the odds of an identity theft attempt from a baseline risk of roughly 2% all the way to 97%.
Another federal whistleblower reported repeated attempts from an IP address in Russia to break in using DOGE login credentials.
The upshot is that DOGE’s actions — uploading every single Social Security number to an unauthorized storage environment, subject to unknown risk from unknown cybercriminals — put all of us at risk of...
Victoria’s Essential Services Commission (ESC), the state’s main regulator, says it has suspended another business from the Victorian Energy Upgrades (VEU) program after alleged false claims. The ...