CISA tries to contain data leak
145 points by speckx 10 hours ago | 42 comments
  • m3047 10 hours ago |
    CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.”

    Oh wow. Except for those secrets.

    • InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago |
      Except for all the leaked data, absolutely no data was leaked.
      • hsbauauvhabzb 4 hours ago |
        See the trick is to not consider your data sensitive, no SENSITIVE data was leaked.
        • Terr_ 4 hours ago |
          There is no data leakage from the application where the front-fell-off, because we towed the data outside the environment.

          https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

          • hsbauauvhabzb 3 hours ago |
            ‘Logs do not indicate hackers access any sensitive data, because we did not implement logging and did not look very hard for auxiliary evidence’
    • shakna 4 hours ago |
      Well, "Sensitive" is the second lowest data label. It must all just be above that.
    • unethical_ban 3 hours ago |
      Didn't RTFA, was any actual secret data or any IOC, log tampering, etc. found?
    • bandrami 2 hours ago |
      Unfortunately "sensitive" has a specific meaning that they may be being legalistic with. PII, for example, is generally not "sensitive".
    • oofbey an hour ago |
      Willful ignorance. "No indication" meaning they haven't seen any evidence anything was compromised. Could be because they've been working very hard not to look at any evidence or analysis of what happened. "I'm not aware of X" is very different from "X is not true".
  • fragmede 7 hours ago |
    > “Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”

    More competent technical control means a random contractor doesn't have passwords from mid-2025 to copy to their home machine that even still work after 30 days, if not 5.

    • xoa 6 hours ago |
      This. In fact I thought the government had long since gotten pretty serious about using smartcards and HSMs for everything? Why let anyone take any sort of accessible credential at all vs handing out hardware they can use but that cannot have the credentials taken off? At some organizations the extra cost would be a concern of course but that wouldn't be the case here.

      Or maybe that'd have been the sort of project and standard CISA would have formerly done before the Republicans gutted it last year I guess, and this is just another symptom of rot? But yeah to your point technology certainly can absolutely help with this sort of thing. It's not some inevitable act of nature.

      • acdha 3 hours ago |
        I think you have to look at it against the backdrop of so many people being fired and new employees being tasked with “urgent” projects across the government. It’s very plausible that the people who used to enforce all of the policies which would’ve preceded or contained this were either fired for political reasons or didn’t think they could tell someone to follow policy if it slowed them down.
      • andrewflnr 30 minutes ago |
        I worked for a bit in an org that was agglomerated into CISA. Let's just say PKI integration continues to be infeasibly difficult for most projects, especially small ones. (And cost is very, very much a concern. Be honest, do you want your taxes going into a project where it isn't?)
    • dylan604 3 hours ago |
      I don't work with national secrets, but I do have access to sensitive/valuable to the client data. The thought of downloading anything directly to my device is just beyond me. I don't even like downloading log files with something like "aws s3 cp s3://client/file - | less". I'd much rather fire up a cheap instance and view the data within their VPC.
  • niwtsol 7 hours ago |
    What an egregious mistake. "exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository" - isn't is git 101 to not put creds in git? What pattern do they think this is consistent with?
    • apnorton 7 hours ago |
      They're not defending it as an established workflow pattern or some kind of best practice.

      The usage of "exhibit a pattern consistent with..." is just describing what it looks like the repository was used for. i.e. it's not a set of government sourcecode for an internal project, it's not something indicative of intentionally leaking large amounts of data, etc.

    • nkrisc 5 hours ago |
      > What pattern do they think this is consistent with?

      They clearly stated what pattern this usage is consistent with: using it as a sort of personal scratch pad.

      You’re assigning more meaning to the statement than there is. They are simply stating an observation.

    • irishcoffee 5 hours ago |
      If I had a dollar for the amount of secrets committed to public repositories I could probably retire. No, that isn’t an excuse. Pretending the US govt isn’t made up of people just like you or I is quite silly.
      • Arubis 4 hours ago |
        If I had a dollar for each secret I’ve committed to a public repo, I could probably buy a couple of sandwiches. I’m not smarter and my opsec probably isn’t any better than most old devs, but I also don’t have a treasure trove of government secrets on disk and—crucially!—_I would make different decisions if did_.

        The nuance here: when I’ve slipped and committed secrets, it’s typically a relative nothing burger: most common case is API keys to some third-party service. I’ve worked across a bunch of regulated industries and, within those, not caused a breach—because being in that space you know to be more careful, and because the companies in those spaces (wisely!) tend to support good security practices, more so than the industry average.

      • Terr_ 4 hours ago |
        Hold up, I think we have some sort of math denominator problem here.

        You'd be rich if you got a dollar for every worldwide murder too, but that doesn't make murder a common workplace occurrence.

        • irishcoffee 4 hours ago |
          ‘Tis a lot different mentality typing git commit/git push than it is to murder someone in cold blood, I guess?
          • Terr_ 3 hours ago |
            I was thinking more purely in terms of frequency. For a dollar a pop, you can be "rich" for worldwide events that are actually very rare things.
  • Cider9986 7 hours ago |
    Maybe Massie was right when he didn't want to fund CISA.
    • water-data-dude 6 hours ago |
      Maybe this is what happens when you fill roles based on loyalty to one person rather than competence
  • imglorp 7 hours ago |
    It's almost like gutting the agency of experts diminishes their opsec capacity among many others.

    In 2020 Chris Krebs contradicted stolen election claims. In 2025, Trump sacked Krebs and revoked his clearance, leaving CISA without a director. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs

    In March 2025, the cuts began. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-st...

    In 2026, it was still without a director and running on fumes. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/us-cybersecurity-agency-ci...

    This activity is consistent with intentionally weakening a country's defenses from within and sowing chaos.

    • wnevets 6 hours ago |
      If a foreign adversary was in charge would we know the difference?
    • bink 4 hours ago |
      Krebs was fired in 2020, not 2025.
      • imglorp 3 hours ago |
        Correct, thank you, I can't edit now though. Fired in 2020, clearance revoked in 2025.
    • andrewflnr 4 hours ago |
      Let's be real, it's more directly consistent with aggressive incompetence and hiring/firing based on loyalty. As for how the relevant fools ended up with the power to hire or fire, I'll grant that's a more complicated question...
  • 0x59 6 hours ago |
    Reminds me of the enshittification of public transit. Reduce funding, service level decreases, negative sentiment follows.

    Eventually, paths like that may lead to increased privatization through security contractors.

    • mrtesthah 4 hours ago |
      It was a security contractor who leaked the creds. So this is already the increased privatization end-game.
  • 0xbadcafebee 5 hours ago |
    > CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions
  • fhn 5 hours ago |
    Lawmakers want answers but they never provide answers themselves. Who watches the so-called watchers? Corruption on a massive scale on by lawmakers but when a key gets published, heads will roll? Keys are mistakenly published all the time by very smart people. Ever ran rm -rf *? Every destroy a production db? Ever power off the wrong server? Yes.
  • omgJustTest 3 hours ago |
    Seems senators had questions about why CISA was scaling back efforts related to election security[1]. Tulsi's resignation today seems interestingly timed to when this became public.

    [1]https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padil...

    • da_chicken 2 hours ago |
      I don't know why US senators are up in arms about this. Trump was extremely clear when he gave them his budget that he wanted CISA's budget drastically cut. He also specifically directed CISA to shut down their election security office.

      This is the "who killed Hannibal" meme. If Padilla and Warner didn't know about this, then they're incompetent themselves. Especially because they reported on it last year:

      https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/news-coverage/cnn-tr...

      Why did you forget this happened, Padilla?

      • N2yhWNXQN3k9 an hour ago |
        > Why did you forget this happened, Padilla?

        because behind any senator there is a propaganda team, not a brain

  • bandrami 3 hours ago |
    I remember when they leaked a million SF-86s. You know, the form we fill out with a ton of highly personal information so they can decide if we can be trusted with sensitive data.
    • browsingonly 2 hours ago |
      That wasn't a leak, it was a breach (perpetrated by Chinese state security).
      • fhn an hour ago |
        with a breach, the data ends up in one group's hand but a leak means everyone gets access. Which would you rather have?
        • r_lee 25 minutes ago |
          I think logically you'd want the former. with a leak the group will get their hands on it anyways, might as well try to limit reach
    • dgacmu an hour ago |
      Wasn't that OPM, not CISA?
  • pianopatrick 2 hours ago |
    If these guys who are supposed to be the experts cannot really be secure on the internet, I'm not sure how anyone else is supposed to be secure on the internet.