FBI director's Based Apparel site has been spotted hosting a 'ClickFix' attack

I disagree. I think the caliber of public employee, and their integrity, would be much higher if they were "only" allowed to collect their salary.

No state employee would be allowed to run a business like this while employed where I live (sapphire-blue New England state FWIW). Government positions are fairly, but not extravagantly, compensated, prestigious and come with excellent benefits. They should not be an avenue for accumulation of riches. It clearly does not work well and we're not getting the country's best.

> a low paid, public job

I think there should probably be a level at which those requirements kick in, but keep in mind that most of the jobs we're talking about pay around $200k/year, with many of the daily and life expenses included as benefits, pushing the equivalent salary even higher.

It's not like they lose their money or lose the ability to invest their pre-public money. They could sell their business interests, then take the proceeds and put the money into a broad market fund (to prevent company- or industry-specific conflicts of interest). I'd even suggest making them exempt from capital gains should they choose to sell.

> What it achieves, is that the quality of people who assume office sinks even lower than it is today, since anyone with a modicum of competence, would never divest a business for a low paid, public job.

Unless of course those with a modicum of competence desire to be true public servants. Read about the character of some of our great leaders like Washington, Lincoln or Eisenhower to understand the mentality of a true public servant. Something someone like Kash Patel knows nothing about.

I don’t think this level of virtue is all that rare, though it is rarely rewarded at the ballot box.

I’m not a CPA, but aren’t there plenty of legal ways to divest in a business where you’re not directly involved, but where you can still get a share of any profits?

It is the mix of high-security high-visibility national impact with organizations that are completely unequipped to operate in that arena.

> it would be a target regardless of who owns it currently.

The commonality of attacks makes it more important to eliminate distracting dependencies for critical leaders. Not less.

There is a reason top security clearances have requirements no normal organization could make on their employers. Lack of loose vectors is even more important for leaders.

Arch Wiki's core content is instructions of what commands to run right in the terminal.

Agreed, this is the first thing I thought of too. Don't teach people to paste unknown commands into their terminal!

I understand what you’re saying but in this case notice they don’t even mention terminal or command lines. You have to already understand enough context to know what they mean and at that point you should be able to interpret the command itself.

To be fair, just because you understand the code you see doesn't mean its safe to copy-paste. Many of these compromised sites will show something that appears to be a benign command but will be something entirely different when you copy them.

Not good to get people into the habit of copying and running code in their terminal.

To paraphrase Hickam's dictum, a phone can have as many sources of malware as it damn well pleases.

Amazes me that, after the events of the past 3 years, so many people still think Russia is the major foreign influence on our politics.

Don't be ridiculous, it would be Israeli.

Why not both?

Sure, but they do after hackers like the ones attacking Based Apparel.

I wouldn't hire a doctor either that has food poisoning every two weeks.

I wouldn't hire a security guard that gets held up often.