According to digital documents seen by Reuters, the most well-known member of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once supported a criminal group that boasted about cyberstalking an FBI agent and trafficking in stolen data.
One of the most well-known participants in the DOGE initiative, which has been granted extensive access to official networks in an effort to drastically reduce the size of the US government, is Edward Coristine.
His youth—he is 19—and his moniker, “bigballs,” which became a joke in popular culture, were the main topics of previous reportage. Last month, Musk took to his social media platform X to support the teenager, telling his fans that “Big Balls is awesome.”
According to business and digital documents examined by Reuters and interviews with six former coworkers, Coristine operated a network services company named DiamondCDN starting in 2022 while still a high school student. Among its users was a website operated by a group of cybercriminals going by the moniker “EGodly,” according to digital records kept by the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run and the internet intelligence firm DomainTools.
The specifics of Coristine’s relationship with EGodly have never been revealed before.
On February 15, 2023, EGodly posted on the Telegram chat service to express gratitude to Coristine’s company for its support.
“We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” read the email.
Messages asking for comment were not answered by Coristine. Emails concerning Coristine were unanswered by Musk’s team, which has taken on the name “Department of Government Efficiency” despite not being an actual government agency. According to one official at each department who told Reuters they had seen his name in their respective agencies’ staff directories, he is a “senior adviser” at the State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security department.
Coristine calls himself a “Volunteer (Intern) Plumber” working for the U.S. government on LinkedIn.
Messages inquiring about Coristine were not answered by the State Department. CISA, which is in charge of defending federal government networks against foreign spies and hackers, declined to comment.
For the past year, EGodly’s Telegram channel has been quiet; efforts to get eight participants or users who engaged with EGodly to comment were fruitless.
