DOGE employee Edward Coristine lands at CISA with DHS email
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old staffer in billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with a reported history of interacting with hacking groups, has been given physical access to building facilities at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Coristine is listed with a DHS email address and has been seen inside CISA, according to a person familiar with the matter and a directory image viewed by Nextgov/FCW. It is not clear what systems he had access to. CISA and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Various media reports have tied Coristine to interactions with cybercriminals. A report from independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs linked Coristine to a cybercrime syndicate known as The Com. In conversations with the cybercrime community, he allegedly used the handle “Rivage” and frequented interaction hubs that facilitated hacking activities.
Coristine was fired from a company, Path Networks, after leaking internal firm secrets to a competitor, Krebs and Bloomberg News also reported. The decision to place Coristine in CISA means he is now embedded in an agency that contains U.S. intelligence on worldwide cyber threats.
In early February, Wired reported that a Telegram handle linked to Coristine had solicited a hacking service in 2022. The payload requested was a distributed denial-of-service attack, used to overwhelm a server with bot traffic that causes it to crash.
Coristine was a former intern at brain implant startup Neuralink, another Musk-owned company. Coristine and another DOGE worker, Luke Farritor, are listed in internal State Department directories, Nextgov/FCW previously reported.
In recent days, the cyber agency has laid off around 130 employees, including those hired under a new Cybersecurity Talent Management System program, designed to lure top technical talent from the private sector by offering them higher salaries. It also paused election security activities and put staff focused on countering mis- and disinformation on administrative leave.
