A 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was fired from an internship at a cybersecurity firm after he was accused of leaking company secrets to a competitor, Bloomberg News reports.
Edward Coristine was “terminated for leaking internal information,” a message from June 2022 from an executive at Path Network stated, according to the outlet.
“This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this,” the message stated.
“I can confirm that Edward Coristine's brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” a spokesperson for the company told Bloomberg on Thursday.
Coristine wrote that he still had access to the company’s computers after leaving the firm, but he added that he hadn’t taken advantage of it.
In a Discord chat in late 2022, he wrote that he had “access to every single machine.” Using the online moniker “Rivage,” the teenager said he could have wiped the company’s servers if he had wanted to.
"I never exploited it because it's just not me,” said Coristine.
The comments were shared in a Discord server that focused on a competitor, which concerned executives at Path Network, who thought there was no reason a former employee should have access to their system, a source told Bloomberg.
Following his removal, Coristine said on Discord that he had done “nothing contractually wrong” during his time at Path Network.
