The more we delve into the backgrounds of the young, inexperienced Muskovites in Elon Musk’s DOGE team, the more disturbing things that we find. The latest: 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine — who is listed as an “expert” for the Office of Personnel and Management, has been accessing systems of the Small Business Administration, and has been a part of “sneak attack” meetings with General Services Administration employees — was fired from an internship at cybersecurity firm Path Network after he was accused of sharing company secrets with a competitor, Bloomberg reports today. What’s more, US law enforcement officials have been following Coristine’s online ativity for some time, revealing his interest in harassment campaigns and Nazism.
“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”
A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm said Thursday: “I can confirm that Edward Coristine's brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.”
Coristine showed no remorse for what he had done at Path Network, and in fact claimed in a post on Discord that he had done “nothing contractually wrong.” What’s more, he claimed in another Discord post that he had retained access to the cybersecurity company’s computers and could have wiped out Path Network’s customer-supporting servers if he had wanted to.
Several of Coristine’s online peers and former co-workers said they were surprised that the teenage friend they knew has been brought into one of the most high-profile teams in the Trump administration. His 2022 dismissal and the circumstances surrounding it add to questions about how he arrived in this new job with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and how he’ll handle the sensitive government information that comes with it.
Just as startling as Coristine’s history of playing fast and loose with sensitive information, Bloomberg reports that two US law enforcement officials who investigate cybercrimes have been following Coristine’s online activity for some time now. They’ve been tracking online chat rooms that Coristine and others participated in for at least a year.
The officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss their work, said they first became aware of (Coristine), under the usernames “Rivage” and “JoeyCrafter,” while investigating an alleged hacker who Coristine was communicating with in an online forum.
Coristine’s chatroom activity revealed his interest in both harassing people online and in-person, and in Nazism.
JoeyCrafter was a member of Telegram groups called “Kiwi Farms Christmas Chat” and “Kiwi Farms 100% Real No Fake No Virus,” both referencing an online forum known for harassment campaigns. Typically, the site has been used to share the personal information of a target, encouraging others to harass them online, in-person, over the phone or by falsely alerting police to a violent crime or active shooter incident at their home.
In online messages, the aliases that investigators said Coristine uses have regularly discussed free speech and internet providers’ role in keeping websites online, including one that hosted the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer.
And THIS, my friends, is who now has access to sensitive government information across multiple federal agencies and is determining the qualifications of seasoned government employees. God help us all.
UPDATE
KrebsonSecurity provides details on how Coristine is “a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.” I’m not familiar with this source so please keep that in mind, but he seems to have a credible background so I thought it was worth sharing.
