History, Security

Musk of Sedition: Why Attacks Inside American Government Smell Like North Korea

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Today’s CNN report about suicidal North Korean soldiers in Ukraine should terrify anyone who understands institutional collapse.

I’ve spent decades studying how societies descend into authoritarianism and as a security professional, I’m watching patterns that I know all too well emerge at unprecedented speed in American institutions.

Consider what we’re seeing in Ukraine: young North Korean soldiers carrying handwritten loyalty pledges, documenting each other’s “disloyalty,” removing protective gear to prove dedication, and detonating grenades rather than being captured.

A handwritten page found on one of the North Korean soldiers recorded acts of disloyalty by North Korean subordinates. Rebecca Wright/CNN

These aren’t just tactical choices – they’re the end result of a system that values loyalty to false prophets above all else, including human life.

Now look at what’s happening in American federal institutions. The Office of Personnel Management is installing new centralized communication systems that shatter decades of security protocols. Career civil servants are being illegally replaced by startlingly young loyalists. Traditional agency independence is being deliberately dismantled.

These parallels aren’t subtle to an expert in authoritarian dangers.

Here’s what makes this moment uniquely dangerous, requiring additional expertise in cybersecurity: technology is accelerating institutional collapse beyond anything we’ve seen in history.

Radio codes found on one of the North Korean soldiers. Rebecca Wright/CNN

When Mao deployed Red Guards, when Stalin conducted his purges, when the Shah’s SAVAK began its campaigns – these transformations took years. Today, a centralized email system can expose every federal employee to loyalty tests instantly. Social media can identify and target “disloyal” staff within hours by running a single query statement like “DEI”. A teenager with an assault rifle can be placed in charge of critical systems with a single administrative decision.

By the time most people recognize automation of decline and destruction, the professional expertise needed to prevent catastrophic steps – like a button-click to end hundreds of thousands of lives – already may be done and unrecoverable.

When Twitter’s $44B purchase led to 80% value destruction, pundits laughed at Elon Musk as incompetent and cruel. They missed his actual intentions dog-whistled by him for years.

Hitler’s 1933 ‘Volksempfänger’ program was giving away radios at a 75% loss to destroy democracy and replace it with Nazi adherents. Both sacrificed billions to gain control of communication infrastructure, celebrating deceptive and illegal “exit package” tactics meant to accelerate end of freedom.

Seemingly “bad business” decisions of massive devaluation and loss make perfect sense when viewed as evil charity – tools for rapid institutional control and cult-like loyalty enforcement rather than profit-seeking ventures. The toxic exit packages are institutional suicide pills, similar to how Hitler’s “Night of Long Knives” eliminated opposition through emphasis on rapid “exits.”

The new appointees – averaging 29 years old compared to the typical 52 – are specifically being selected to lack the knowledge that would recognize catastrophic risks someone wants them to make… again (e.g. MAGA). When a 26-year-old was placed in charge of nuclear command protocols they didn’t understand how keeping authentication systems separate from general communications networks is critical to safety – literally the most famous catastrophic design flaw in all hacker history (e.g. 1983 NORAD near-miss and the infamous 2600 phreakers).

The patterns are clear: when loyalty becomes the only metric that matters, when youth are elevated specifically because they lack the judgment to resist, when technology enables instant implementation of control systems – you’re watching the death of professional judgment and institutional knowledge in real time.

Some will say this analysis is alarmist. They’ll say American institutions are resilient. They’ll say we’ve survived previous challenges. But they’re missing how technology has changed the game. The speed of institutional collapse in the digital age isn’t even comparable to historical examples that were measured in months and years. We don’t have the luxury of analog and physical warning signs.

The North Korean soldiers show us exactly where America is headed at warp speed because, unlike their 1980s view of the world, we are throwing $500 Billion at AI “end of society” announcements: young people primed to throw away lives based on loyalty tests alone, unable to adapt or think independently, following long-outdated patterns even as they die.

The time to recognize deadly devotion to loyalty over competence, to recognize the prioritization of control over effectiveness, is before it becomes irreversible. History is clear on this point: once institutional knowledge is purged, once professional judgment to protect lives is replaced by suicidal loyalty tests, once the young and inexperienced are given authority specifically because they lack the context to resist – the rushed slide into full institutional collapse becomes nearly impossible to stop. Even physical coercion becomes digital:

[Czechoslovakian] President Hácha was in such a state of exhaustion that he more than once needed medical attention from the [Nazi] doctors, who, by the way, had been there ready for service since the beginning of the interview. […] At 4:30 in the morning, Dr. Hacha, in a state of total collapse, and kept going only by means of injections, resigned himself with death in his soul to give his signature [for Hitler to seize power and invade].

We need to name what we’re seeing. This isn’t normal administrative change. This isn’t partisan politics as usual. This is the deliberate installation of North Korean-style loyalty systems in American institutions, accelerated by technology to a speed we’ve never seen before in human history.

The question isn’t why Trump regularly praises authoritarian leaders including North Koreans and what he would do to be like them – history has answered such questions too many times to count. The question is whether enough people recognize it right here and right now to prevent America’s institutions from following North Korea’s path towards youth rushing to blow themselves up and take down democracy, just to prove their absolute loyalty to Musk and his assistant Trump.

Tesla design failures allegedly cause an unpredictable veering into trees and poles, causing catastrophic fires that trap occupants and kill them. Three young Piedmont students were burned to death in their brand new Cybertruck… among the nearly two dozen people tragically killed in their Tesla “Swasticars” in October and November of 2024 alone. Image source: Harry Harris
Swasticars: Remote-controlled explosive devices (REDs) stockpiled by Musk outside Berlin.

Security

Nepenthes: Aggressive Anti-AI Malware Burns Bots

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Some openly warn they just want to watch AI burn, and the robots come knocking anyway.

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

Or as the warning label puts it…

THIS IS DELIBERATELY MALICIOUS SOFTWARE INTENDED TO CAUSE HARMFUL ACTIVITY. DO NOT DEPLOY IF YOU AREN’T FULLY COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Security

Trained Vulnerability: Trump Demands Federal Staff Fall Victim to Attacks

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Let’s just call this “trained vulnerability,” the kind usually found in authoritarian regimes that demand suicide as a loyalty test. Recent policy changes at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) are trying to condition federal employees to step on a landmine (fall victim to common attack patterns).

No, really.

Two federal employees are suing the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to block the agency from creating a new email distribution system — an action that comes as the information will reportedly be directed to a former staffer to Elon Musk now at the agency.

The suit, launched by two anonymous federal employees, ties together two events that have alarmed members of the federal workforce and prompted privacy concerns.

That includes an unusual email from OPM last Thursday reviewed by The Hill said the agency was testing “a new capability” to reach all federal employees — a departure from staffers typically being contacted directly by their agency’s human resources department.

Also cited in the suit is an anonymous Reddit post Monday from someone purporting to be an OPM employee, saying a new server was installed at their office after a career employee refused to set up a direct line of communication to all federal employees

Under the guise of administrative efficiency, new directives are dismantling years of security awareness training and creating an environment for phishing attacks to be indistinguishable from official communications.

That’s how dictatorship works.

The implementation of a new centralized email system without any proper safety, means big trouble for America right here and now. Traditional federal IT security relied on distributed agency isolation as safety from abuse, with each department maintaining its own communication channels and employee databases. The new system shatters national security protections by creating cross-agency communication channels without baseline security controls or Privacy Impact Assessments. There’s no balance, there’s no resilience, there is only pull the pin and shout dear leader’s name in a “blaze of glory” mindset associated with Nazi Germany, the Hitlerjugend, and… Elon Musk.

A light-touch booklet originally released by Imperial War Museum (UK), then republished by Ballentine (US) in 1971. Considered a collectible by Nazi supporters.
Source: Twitter

The conditioning for compromise is both systematic and comprehensive. Federal employees are instructed to respond to emails from unfamiliar systems, confirm private details to “test” messages, and accept administrative requests from outside their agency’s normal channels. This mirrors common attacks so closely that distinguishing legitimate requests from threats becomes impossible.

From a technical perspective, the reported low-quality setup creates an environment ripe for adversarial exploitation. Any attacker can replicate a “legitimate” system now by setting up a mail server, as official communication patterns match known phishing techniques. When official policy demands behavior that matches attack signatures, the ability to detect and prevent compromises is toast.

This situation represents more than just poor security practice – it’s an active degradation of federal safety, like a neon sign over DC saying “we always click on everything”. The implementation of this system sets a dangerous precedent where administrative policy actively undermines common sense, let alone basic security practices. The challenge lies in protecting systems where threat actors and administrators were intentionally made indistinguishable from each other.

And the person installing the mail server, running the federal government? A child reporting to Elon Musk, literally an incompetent minor.

Sources tell WIRED that the OPM’s top layers of management now include individuals linked to xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Palantir. One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin. …graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink.