Dear Fellow Readers,

If you’re still here, I seriously have the deepest gratitude and offer my sincerest apologies. The radio silence lasted longer than usual, and to be frank, a lot of dumb, ridiculous shit happened that made it glaringly obvious my personal life needed some TLC. Actually, a lot of TLC.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to what I wanted to talk about.

This.

Yep. That one. And not from a political lens but from a cybersecurity one.

The installation of inexperienced, barely-out-of-their-diapers engineers into systems and databases it takes corporations years to access is something straight out of a hacker’s wet dream. It’s the ultimate internal R.U.D.Y. attack. (R.U.D.Y. = R-U-Dead-Yet). These types of attacks operate low and slow, strategically exhausting resources and poisoning systems while quietly gathering information on, well, everyone who’s ever interacted with the infrastructure.

This particular agency wormed its way in using real credentials, slowly gutted staffing, disabled audit logs, and systematically dismantled any form of oversight. And guess who ends up taking the fall? The same staff who were told to pack their bags.

It’s an attack that keeps systems barely functional, just enough to keep the lights on, while it erodes trust, performance, and resilience from the inside out. Honestly, it’s almost… impressive. Blue teams are sweating. Red and Black teams are throwing confetti. Everything we thought we knew about federal cybersecurity? It’s up for grabs now. FEDRAMP? NIST? CISA?
 Sorry, don’t know them.

One of DOGE’s latest blunders involved an employee accidentally publishing a private key tied directly to several (and I mean several) large language models developed by xAI. Grok, the AI chatbot embedded in Twitter/X, relies on these models as an overglorified search bar pretending to be an intelligent fact-checker. Recently, it started spewing antisemitic rhetoric and even invoked Adolf Hitler, all while positioned as a tool for “truth.”

This came right before the Department of Defense announced a $200 million contract with xAI to use Grok, and honestly, I don’t have enough 2025 Bingo Cards to make sense of whatever grand futuristic vision they have in mind.

Oh, and that’s not even the first time. Less than two months earlier, another xAI dev leaked private GitHub credentials that exposed internal LLM configurations for Tesla, SpaceX, and basically anything Musk-branded.

If I’ve lost you, here’s a few examples:

• Picture handing over your diary, your password list, and your banking PINs to someone who thinks “cyber hygiene” just means using Purell on your keyboard.
• It’s like trusting a house sitter who leaves your front door open, feeds your cat Pop Rocks, and then goes live on Twitch from your bed using your credit card.

So yeah, nothing to worry about. Just billions of dollars, national defense infrastructure, and the foundation of public trust in federal tech security on the line. Totally fine.

Don’t panic. Not yet. The systems haven’t completely imploded, at least not today. But stay vigilant. Pay attention. The quiet erosion of security standards is often how the worst breaches begin. We need to build and maintain systems where the security flaws aren’t so glaringly obvious that someone with a browser and a hunch can stumble onto a critical leak. Security shouldn’t be the weakest link visible from space.

And to the developers out there casually leaking secrets and treating secure coding like an optional elective, you’re a joke. You’re not just embarrassing yourselves, you’re putting real people and real systems at risk. Do better. Seriously.