The Incompetence of the Trump Regime

[spud_meister]

Once-Private Government Networks Are Now Exposed, Making Cyber-Espionage Easier than Ever

A new investigation shows nuclear secrets and government servers are dangerously exposed to nation-state hackers.

cyberintel.substack.com

Over the past month, an unprecedented number of critical government systems, including those at the nation’s nuclear research labs, have been exposed to the open internet. This exposure jeopardizes both U.S. national security and the privacy of millions of Americans.

Notably, this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.

The Scale of Vulnerability Is Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen
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Beginning on January 8, 2025, a surge of U.S. government infrastructure began appearing on what’s known as “the search engine of Internet-connected devices,” Shodan.io.

Federal agencies typically secure their systems behind multiple layers of protection, ensuring that critical services – such as mail servers, directory services, VPNs, internal IP addresses, and remote access gateways – remain isolated from public access.

The scope and severity of exposed government networks is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s hard to even have a baseline to compare it to. But one thing’s for sure–adversaries such as Russia and China are dancing for joy.

Essentially, whatever is causing once-private government networks to suddenly be publicly observable is making the lives of Chinese and Russian hackers much easier–we’re doing the first stage of hacking campaigns, network reconnaissance, for them. With such easy insights into once-secret U.S. networks, the likelihood of data breaches impacting millions of Americans becomes that much higher.

Trump's opening up the entirety of the US government's digital footprint to malign actors. But this is my favourite part:

Between January 14 and February 8, servers belonging to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory have been found with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services exposed to the public internet. This grants malicious actors the opportunity to hack into servers hosting sensitive nuclear research data, a golden egg for spy agencies across the globe.

Alarmingly, a Department of Energy server allowed anonymous login with write access, raising the risk of hackers uploading malicious code or installing backdoors for persistent network access.