According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.
The group says those lapses put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk.
Soooo here is a general question about cybersecurity.
Is it really important if there are no consequences to breeches?
Same way big business see fines as a cost of doing business, I think we are getting to a time that breaches might become part of business as usual.
I actually think that’s a good thing as a person who promotes self hosting. If the assumption becomes that your data is never safe in corporate hands, people might move away from having their entire lives on the cloud.
To a degree, it already is business as usual for these firms (look at their underinvestment in IT infrastructure). The issue for the self-hosting community is that not enough of the population is technologically literate enough to understand the risks of using these platforms (insert any Meta/Bytedance/Microsoft/Amazon platform here), and the critical mass of users will remain perpetually vulnerable.
With that being said, for those with the literacy required, self-hosting is a secure breath of fresh air.