One of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's DOGE employees was revealed to have been fired by a cybersecurity firm he worked at for leaking company secrets.
The employee in question is 19-year-old Edward Coristine. He was previously fired from an internship after being accused of sharing sensitive information with a competitor of the firm he was working for at the time.
Leaking Internal Company Information
In a June 2022 message, an executive of the firm in question, Path Network, said that Coristine had been terminated for leaking internal information to competitors. They added that this was unacceptable and noted that the company had zero tolerance for it.
A spokesperson for the cybersecurity firm also said on Thursday that Coristine's brief contract with the company was terminated after an internal investigation concluded. This was to look into the leaking of proprietary company information during the teen's tenure at the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm, according to Yahoo News.
Weeks after his termination, Coristine wrote in a Discord post in 2022 that he had retained access to the cybersecurity firm's computers. The teen said he had the opportunity to wipe Path Network's customer-supporting servers if he wanted to, but he did not, saying he never exploited his access.
However, his Discord post, which was on a server focused on another competitor company, raised concerns at Path Network. Executives believed that there was no legitimate reason for a former employee to retain access to their machines.
Coristine responded to his firing by saying that he had done "nothing contractually wrong" while he was working on an internship at Path Network. Many of the teen's online peers and former co-workers were surprised he was brought into one of the most high-profile teams in the Trump administration, Bloomberg reported.
Read also: Elon Musk Rehires DOGE Staffer After Racist Social Media Posts: 'To Err is Human, to Forgive Divine'
Handling Sensitive Government Information
The teen's termination from Path Network in 2022 and the circumstances of his separation from the cybersecurity firm raise questions about how he landed a new job with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Coristine's latest work will involve handling sensitive government information.
The news of Coristine's dismissal from Path Network comes after another DOGE employee, Marko Elez, suddenly resigned after it was revealed that he made a series of racist social media posts.
However, it is still unclear whether Elez actually parted ways with Musk's company because of the racist messages or because he ransacked the U.S. Treasury Department's payments system and pushed through code changes, as per Futurism.
Originally published on Parent Herald
