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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

This whole article reads like a comedy. Hidden accounts, login attempts from Russia (they can't afford IP addresses elsewhere?), and then there is this:

"Berulis told KrebsOnSecurity he was in the process of filing a support ticket with Microsoft to request more information about the DOGE accounts when his network administrator access was restricted. Now, he’s hoping lawmakers will ask Microsoft to provide more information about what really happened with the accounts."

Why does Microsoft have login and account information for a government institution? I'd prefer a mainframe without Windows or Internet access in the basement.

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> Why does Microsoft have login and account information for a government institution?

Undoubtedly Office365. Difficult to run a bureaucracy without Word or Outlook.

(French/German governments investing in a replacement for this kind of reason: https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-d... )

Russia and China run their goverment offices with their own Linux distributions for very long now.

That's why we have docx

1. "Russian IPs" give them plausible deniability for people who are Pavlovian for that soundbite. 2. Plausible deniability no longer required for an administration with components that are obviously Kremlin influenced.

Both azure and aws apparently have the government as fairly large chunks of their userbase. It does raise some questions.

apparently? JEDI and Wild and Stormy were two programs just from the DoD and NSA that were 20 billion USD.

AWS, Azure, Oracle, SUSE (via Rancher) and I am sure GCP all have confidential & classified (C/S/TS) clouds, as well as lower FedRAMP clouds to get that sweet sweet federal money.

Not sure what questions it raises, it has been a thing for decades.

Given that extra information I guess:

Who handles physical security and what sort of place is it located that it can house that kind of data?

To what degree is the federal government subsidizing Amazon's retail dominance?

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

None of this is new, AWS' dedicated US government stuff has existed for around a decade.

> To what degree is the federal government subsidizing Amazon's retail dominance?

Not more than any other big AWS customer.

> Who handles physical security and what sort of place is it located that it can house that kind of data?

In general, the cloud/systems operator, in conjunction with the launch customer will build a dedicated facility for the classified stuff, and for the controlled stuff may have a dedicated facility, or have segments of the DCs in the US with extra security. for the classified stuff, there is a pretty rigorous list of requirements for the DC, and for any NOC that operates the service.

> To what degree is the federal government subsidizing Amazon's retail dominance?

A fair bit, but they are just like any big customer - just with higher margins. I think that was part of the reasoning for breaking up JEDI after AWS got it - the administration at the time hated the AMZN leadership, so wanted to remove money firehose from them and give it to others.

What questions? All of the major cloud operators have government offerings too.

> login attempts from Russia (they can't afford IP addresses elsewhere?)

There’s some history of Russian intelligence being rather blatant here (presumably deliberately, as a way of making a statement). Remember Guccifer 2.0? That persona not only used a Russian ip address, but one which was _assigned to the GRU headquarters building_.

Azure cloud.

Nobody has ever been fired for buying Microsoft, which is a shame.

> login attempts from Russia (they can't afford IP addresses elsewhere?)

why pretend at this point? they own all of the leadership and there won't be consequences

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