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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has requested a US federal court to block Elon Musk’s DOGE access to US Office of Personnel Management Data

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In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

First, it was reported that people associated with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed the US Treasury computer system, giving them the ability to collect data on and potentially control the department’s roughly $5.45 trillion in annual federal payments.

Then, we learned that uncleared DOGE personnel had gained access to classified data from the US Agency for International Development, possibly copying it onto their own systems. Next, the Office of Personnel Management—which holds detailed personal data on millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances—was compromised. After that, Medicaid and Medicare records were compromised.

Meanwhile, only partially redacted names of CIA employees were sent over an unclassified email account. DOGE personnel are also reported to be feeding Education Department data into artificial intelligence software, and they have also started working at the Department of Energy.

This story is moving very fast. On Feb. 8, a federal judge blocked the DOGE team from accessing the Treasury Department systems any further. But given that DOGE workers have already copied data and possibly installed and modified software, it’s unclear how this fixes anything.

In any case, breaches of other critical government systems are likely to follow unless federal employees stand firm on the protocols protecting national security.

 

The systems that DOGE is accessing are not esoteric pieces of our nation’s infrastructure—they are the sinews of government.

For example, the Treasury Department systems contain the technical blueprints for how the federal government moves money, while the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) network contains information on who and what organizations the government employs and contracts with.

What makes this situation unprecedented isn’t just the scope, but also the method of attack. Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems such as these, using stealth to avoid being seen and carefully hiding any tells or tracks. The Chinese government’s 2015 breach of OPM was a significant US security failure, and it illustrated how personnel data could be used to identify intelligence officers and compromise national security.

In this case, external operators with limited experience and minimal oversight are doing their work in plain sight and under massive public scrutiny: gaining the highest levels of administrative access and making changes to the United States’ most sensitive networks, potentially introducing new security vulnerabilities in the process.

But the most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted. It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.

The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert.

This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error. These measures have been bypassed or ignored. It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault.

The implications for national security are staggering. Sen. Ron Wyden said his office had learned that the attackers gained privileges that allow them to modify core programs in Treasury Department computers that verify federal payments, access encrypted keys that secure financial transactions, and alter audit logs that record system changes. Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network. They are also reportedly training AI software on all of this sensitive data.

This is much more critical than the initial unauthorized access. These new servers have unknown capabilities and configurations, and there’s no evidence that this new code has gone through any rigorous security testing protocols. The AIs being trained are certainly not secure enough for this kind of data. All are ideal targets for any adversary, foreign or domestic, also seeking access to federal data.

There’s a reason why every modification—hardware or software—to these systems goes through a complex planning process and includes sophisticated access-control mechanisms. The national security crisis is that these systems are now much more vulnerable to dangerous attacks at the same time that the legitimate system administrators trained to protect them have been locked out.

By modifying core systems, the attackers have not only compromised current operations, but have also left behind vulnerabilities that could be exploited in future attacks—giving adversaries such as Russia and China an unprecedented opportunity. These countries have long targeted these systems. And they don’t just want to gather intelligence—they also want to understand how to disrupt these systems in a crisis.

Now, the technical details of how these systems operate, their security protocols, and their vulnerabilities are now potentially exposed to unknown parties without any of the usual safeguards. Instead of having to breach heavily fortified digital walls, these parties  can simply walk through doors that are being propped open—and then erase evidence of their actions.

 

The security implications span three critical areas.

First, system manipulation: External operators can now modify operations while also altering audit trails that would track their changes. Second, data exposure: Beyond accessing personal information and transaction records, these operators can copy entire system architectures and security configurations—in one case, the technical blueprint of the country’s federal payment infrastructure. Third, and most critically, is the issue of system control: These operators can alter core systems and authentication mechanisms while disabling the very tools designed to detect such changes. This is more than modifying operations; it is modifying the infrastructure that those operations use.

To address these vulnerabilities, three immediate steps are essential. First, unauthorized access must be revoked and proper authentication protocols restored. Next, comprehensive system monitoring and change management must be reinstated—which, given the difficulty of cleaning a compromised system, will likely require a complete system reset. Finally, thorough audits must be conducted of all system changes made during this period.

This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data and install backdoors to allow for future access.

Each day of continued unrestricted access makes the eventual recovery more difficult and increases the risk of irreversible damage to these critical systems. While the full impact may take time to assess, these steps represent the minimum necessary actions to begin restoring system integrity and security protocols.

Assuming that anyone in the government still cares.

This essay was written with Davi Ottenheimer, and originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it to Firefox users.

Mozilla offers Onerep to Firefox users on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.

The ink on that partnership agreement had barely dried before KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. This seemed to contradict Onerep’s stated motto, “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

Shelest released a lengthy statement (PDF) wherein he acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 — around the same time he started Onerep.

Shelest maintained that Nuwber has “zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep,” and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.”

When asked to comment on the findings, Mozilla said then that although customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO did not align with their values.

“We’re working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first,” Mozilla said.

In October 2024, Mozilla published a statement saying the search for a different provider was taking longer than anticipated.

“While we continue to evaluate vendors, finding a technically excellent and values-aligned partner takes time,” Mozilla wrote. “While we continue this search, Onerep will remain the backend provider, ensuring that we can maintain uninterrupted services while we continue evaluating new potential partners that align more closely with Mozilla’s values and user expectations. We are conducting thorough diligence to find the right vendor.”

Asked for an update, Mozilla said the search for a replacement partner continues.

“The work’s ongoing but we haven’t found the right alternative yet,” Mozilla said in an emailed statement. “Our customers’ data remains safe, and since the product provides a lot of value to our subscribers, we’ll continue to offer it during this process.”

It’s a win-win for Mozilla that they’ve received accolades for their principled response while continuing to partner with Onerep almost a year later. But if it takes so long to find a suitable replacement, what does that say about the personal data removal industry itself?

Onerep appears to be working in partnership with another problematic people-search service: Radaris, which has a history of ignoring opt-out requests or failing to honor them. A week before breaking the story about Onerep, KrebsOnSecurity published research showing the co-founders of Radaris were two native Russian brothers who’d built a vast network of affiliate marketing programs and consumer data broker services.

Lawyers for the Radaris co-founders threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity unless that story was retracted in full, claiming the founders were in fact Ukrainian and that our reporting had defamed the brothers by associating them with the actions of Radaris. Instead, we published a follow-up investigation which showed that not only did the brothers from Russia create Radaris, for many years they issued press releases quoting a fictitious CEO seeking money from investors.

Several readers have shared emails they received from Radaris after attempting to remove their personal data, and those messages show Radaris has been promoting Onerep.

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