Doge software (PuTTY) approval alarms Labor Department employees

nbcnews.com

5 points·hackyhacky··2 comments

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has received approval from the Labor Department to use software that could allow it to transfer vast amounts of data out of Labor’s systems, according to records seen by NBC News and interviews with two employees.

The approval for Musk’s team to use the remote-access and file-transfer software, known as PuTTY, has alarmed some of the Labor Department’s career employees.

Putty is a client, not a server. They should have been alarmed earlier that they had SSH daemon running, if

Transferring government data outside established protocols could have high stakes for anyone whose information is in those databases, because of the chance that more people would have access to their information than originally intended, increasing chances of a breach.

I guess it’s yet another invent something scary and push the agenda under it kind of article.

My read is that the issue is that the employees were approved to run the SSH daemon as a client. The people approved were being approved to view/access data that perhaps they have no need to, nor the vetting or experience to know what data they're dealing with.

Which is a valid concern. The people approving access and the people with access should have clear knowledge, experience and intent on how they will use the tool and for what purpose.

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