I published a follow-up on NPR's scoop last week about a whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), who alleges DOGE created super admin accounts (w/ no logging) at NLRB and transferred ~10GB worth of data from the agency's case files.

The story includes an interview with the whistleblower -- NLRB security architect Daniel Berulis -- and examines the technical claims in his report to lawmakers. He's taking some paid leave for now, noting that the same day the NPR story ran, the NLRB removed administrative rights for its IT staff and almost everyone else at the agency.

The backstory is that both Amazon and Musk’s SpaceX have been suing the NLRB over complaints the agency filed in disputes about workers’ rights and union organizing, arguing that the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional. On March 5, a U.S. appeals court unanimously rejected Musk’s claim that the NLRB’s structure somehow violates the Constitution.

Here's the lede:

"A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the unusual large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from an Internet address in Russia that tried to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account."

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-siphoned-nlrb-case-data/

Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data – Krebs on Security

Okay this is really interesting. The NLRB whistleblower Daniel Berulis told me that he found the DOGE accounts had downloaded three different code libraries from GitHub that none of their IT people or contractors used or knew about. One of them, Berulis said, had in its "README" file a description that said the software was designed as "a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing."

One of the core DOGE employees is Marko Elez, and Elez's GitHub page has a very interesting code repository: async-ip-rotator, created in January 2025

https://github.com/markoelez/async-ip-rotator

Checking the history of this code, Elez's profile says it was forked from this

https://github.com/Ge0rg3/requests-ip-rotator, which says in its description:

"A Python library to utilize AWS API Gateway's large IP pool as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing."

"This library will allow the user to bypass IP-based rate-limits for sites and services."

Gee, I wonder which DOGE employee was in the NLRB in early March?

GitHub - markoelez/async-ip-rotator

Contribute to markoelez/async-ip-rotator development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
@briankrebs Probably should screenshot it all soon. It'll be going private the moment he finds out you noticed.
@JessTheUnstill @briankrebs and request a crawl from The Internet Archive
@JessTheUnstill @briankrebs just use git to download it and its commit history

@briankrebs It's a good thing thorough background checks are done on these people before they're given access to these systems!

Oh, wait...

@briankrebs good thing they hired the (obvious) racist back
@briankrebs Marko Elez is the DOGE employee who had to resign in early February for being an open racist on Xitter
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury
@briankrebs FWIW, he also has a RCE project (https://github.com/markoelez/remote-exec), and an iOS exploit injector (https://github.com/markoelez/syringe). Not really concerning on their own, but given that he has shown intent...
GitHub - markoelez/remote-exec: isolate and execute code remotely in temporary microcontainers (supports java, javascript)

isolate and execute code remotely in temporary microcontainers (supports java, javascript) - markoelez/remote-exec

GitHub

@nonlinear @briankrebs GitHub activity:
5 commits in January
0 in February
1 commit in March
...
107 contributions in private repositories, Apr 12 – Apr 22 🤔

February 9: 5 ssh keys
April 23: 6 ssh keys
...generally means 6 devices with push/pull access. I hope all 6 keys are safe...

@generalx @nonlinear @briankrebs we never ask the cursed questions…
@briankrebs doesn't seem to handle throttling. If they make enough requests per region per second to overload Boto's built in retries (3 attempts by default), app will probably fail. (Disclaimer- someone who has used Amazon's boto client library in python would need to confirm this)

@briankrebs

I smell a stinking musk rat!

@briankrebs As one would expect.
@briankrebs this story is nuts, and yet it seems like just another day under the Trump administration. This article makes clear how WTF this situation is. Thanks as always Brian.

@briankrebs Hats off for your great effort on these kinds of things.

P.S. I'm betting the intruders weren't Russian and that the address was a misdirection.

@AAKL @briankrebs The Russians didn't get in. The intruders were DOGE. My guess is that some DOGE person was penetrated by a Russian hacker, who tried to exploit the hole the DOGE person set up. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at DOGE is using a machine or phone that has all its traffic intercepted and fed to someone working for Russia, not on purpose but because of sloppiness. State actors may have decided to exploit the fact that a bunch of idiots are being given admin access to all government systems.
@not2b @briankrebs That's a possibility. And I know the story mentioned the intrusion came from outside the US. But why would anyone in Russia be interested in the NLRB files, unless the Kremlin is looking for dissidents? One presumes these files are of interest to corporations and billionaires eager to destroy labor laws. So specific parties allied with DOGE - somewhere else - with no clearances, were given the coordinates and the credentials because they wanted the data, presumably to ferret out opposition or "wanted" people. The Russian link is a misdirection.
@AAKL @briankrebs The Russian link appears to be the reason the whistleblower caught the suspicious DOGE activity, because it set off an alarm. I don't know why. One possibility might be that the Russian hacker didn't know exactly what the new account would provide access to and just wanted to find out. Maybe they saw security being disabled and a new account being created, so they thought they could get into a new system without detection.
@not2b @briankrebs Maybe. But the connection was simultaneous with the DOGE login, using DOGE credentials. Yes, these could've been stolen, and the intruder would've had to keep watch, which is possible, or know in advance when DOGE was logging in. It's too much of a coincidence for the exact time and credentials. Were parties interested in the data given the DOGE credentials and told they can log in at this specific time and date.?
@AAKL @briankrebs Was it really simultaneous, or shortly after? My guess is that the person who made the account was penetrated by the person who tried to log in from Russia. If it happened almost immediately, then perhaps there was code to do that.
@not2b @briankrebs Only those with the logs would know that. The Musk wrecking ball doesn't care about federal data security, so who knows who's in the systems now?
@not2b @AAKL IDK if it was at exactly the same time, but he said it was minutes after the accounts were created
@briankrebs @AAKL "minutes" would be long enough for someone to see that the account was created and try it if someone happened to be looking, seems lucky in one sense (great timing!) and unlucky in another (seems the DOGE guys disabled most of the logging but didn't remove the non-US login block).

@briankrebs @not2b Not to derail this thread, but a couple of days ago, Trend Micro published research about ransomware cybercriminals impersonating or claiming DOGE ties.

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/25/d/fog-ransomware-concealed-within-binary-loaders-linking-themselve.html

FOG Ransomware Spread by Cybercriminals Claiming Ties to DOGE

This blog details our investigation of malware samples that conceal within them a FOG ransomware payload.

Trend Micro
@briankrebs
Because of course you respond to an IT related crisis by locking out your IT team.
<Expletive>
@briankrebs So could this be a Russian hack called DOGE?