🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read.

He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords

Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

Who’s the whistleblower?

Daniel Berulis — a senior DevSecOps architect at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), formerly with TS/SCI clearance.

He just told Congress the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pulled off a covert cyber op inside a federal agency.

DOGE demanded root access.
Not auditor access. Not admin.

They were given “tenant owner” privileges in Azure — full control over the NLRB’s cloud, above the CIO himself.
This is never supposed to happen.

They disabled the logs.
Berulis says DOGE demanded account creation with no recordkeeping.

They even ordered security controls bypassed and disabled tools like network watcher so their actions wouldn’t be logged.

And then the data started flowing out.
10+ GB spike in outbound traffic

Exfiltration from NxGen, the NLRB's legal case database
No corresponding inbound traffic
Unusual ephemeral containers and expired storage tokens

They used an external library that used AWS IP pools to rotate IPs for scraping and brute force attacks.

They downloaded external GitHub tools like requests-ip-rotator and browserless — neither of which the agency uses.

The most daming claim in this statement IMO:

Within 15 minutes of DOGE accounts being created…
Attackers in Russia tried logging in using those new creds.
Correct usernames and passwords.

2 options here. The DOGE device was hacked. And I don't think I need to explain the 2nd.

Multi-factor authentication? Disabled.
Someone downgraded Azure conditional access rules — MFA was off for mobile.
This was not approved and not logged.
Cost spikes without new resources.
Azure billing jumped 8% — likely from short-lived high-cost compute used for data extraction, then deleted.

Then came the intimidation.

While preparing this disclosure, Berulis found a drone surveillance photo of himself taped to his front door with a threatening note.

This was just a few days ago.

US-CERT was about to be called in.
CISA’s cyber response team.
But senior officials told them to stand down — no report, no investigation.

I'm going to cover this more as I find out more.

Subscribe to stay up to date:

https://vulnu.com/subscribe

Vulnerable U

Infosec's favorite weekly newsletter for news, tools, and tips with 28,000+ CISOs, founders, change-makers, and straight up hackers.

Vulnerable U
@mattjay Thanks for digging deeper into this, the news coverage did not do this justice. Chilling!
@mattjay yikes, all of this. Thank you for covering it

@CatherineFlick @mattjay
NPR also has an excellent writeup on the whistleblower statement, detailing how DOGE allegedly exfiltrated sensitive NLRB data, including sensitive data which may be valuable to Musks companies.

The statement documents exfiltration tactics which are otherwise only used in illegal activities, e.g. by nation state actors. (Oh, well…)
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security

@marcel @CatherineFlick @mattjay Thanks for pointing to this. I may have scanned it before, but doing a word search for "Russia" told me I should have read it more thoroughly.

@hermannus here's the unrolled thread: https://mastoreader.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstegodon.nl%2F%40hermannus%2F114363523911552456

Next time, kindly set the visibility to 'Mentioned people only' and mention only me (@mastoreaderio). This ensures we avoid spamming others' timelines and threads unless you intend for others to see the unrolled thread link as well.

Thank you!

Masto Reader

@mattjay Never thought I'd see the term "meat space" in a congressional hearing.

A Scottish MP once referred to burner phones in the English parliament and the minister said "WHAT is a "burner phone?

(odd considering his white powder habits...)