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Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI.
Image: Shutterstock, @sdx15.
On July 13, Mr. Elez committed a code script to GitHub called “agent.py” that included a private application programming interface (API) key for xAI. The inclusion of the private key was first flagged by GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users.
Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, said the exposed API key allowed access to at least 52 different LLMs used by xAI. The most recent LLM in the list was called “grok-4-0709” and was created on July 9, 2025.
Grok, the generative AI chatbot developed by xAI and integrated into Twitter/X, relies on these and other LLMs (a query to Grok before publication shows Grok currently uses Grok-3, which was launched in Feburary 2025). Earlier today, xAI announced that the Department of Defense will begin using Grok as part of a contract worth up to $200 million. The contract award came less than a week after Grok began spewing antisemitic rants and invoking Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Elez did not respond to a request for comment. The code repository containing the private xAI key was removed shortly after Caturegli notified Elez via email. However, Caturegli said the exposed API key still works and has not yet been revoked.
“If a developer can’t keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they’re handling far more sensitive government information behind closed doors,” Caturegli told KrebsOnSecurity.
Prior to joining DOGE, Marko Elez worked for a number of Musk’s companies. His DOGE career began at the Department of the Treasury, and a legal battle over DOGE’s access to Treasury databases showed Elez was sending unencrypted personal information in violation of the agency’s policies.
While still at Treasury, Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal linked him to social media posts that advocated racism and eugenics. When Vice President J.D. Vance lobbied for Elez to be rehired, President Trump agreed and Musk reinstated him.
Since his re-hiring as a DOGE employee, Elez has been granted access to databases at one federal agency after another. TechCrunch reported in February 2025 that he was working at the Social Security Administration. In March, Business Insider found Elez was part of a DOGE detachment assigned to the Department of Labor.
Marko Elez, in a photo from a social media profile.
In April, The New York Times reported that Elez held positions at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaus, as well as the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post later reported that Elez, while serving as a DOGE advisor at the Department of Justice, had gained access to the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System (EACS).
Elez is not the first DOGE worker to publish internal API keys for xAI: In May, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how another DOGE employee leaked a private xAI key on GitHub for two months, exposing LLMs that were custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X.
Caturegli said it’s difficult to trust someone with access to confidential government systems when they can’t even manage the basics of operational security.
“One leak is a mistake,” he said. “But when the same type of sensitive key gets exposed again and again, it’s not just bad luck, it’s a sign of deeper negligence and a broken security culture.”
WinDiff is an open-source web-based tool that allows browsing and comparing symbol, type and syscall information of Microsoft Windows binaries across different versions of the operating system. The binary database is automatically updated to include information from the latest Windows updates (including Insider Preview).
It was inspired by ntdiff and made possible with the help of Winbindex.
WinDiff is made of two parts: a CLI tool written in Rust and a web frontend written in TypeScript using the Next.js framework.
The CLI tool is used to generate compressed JSON databases out of a configuration file and relies on Winbindex to find and download the required PEs (and PDBs). Types are reconstructed using resym. The idea behind the CLI tool is to be able to easily update and regenerate databases as new versions of Windows are released. The CLI tool's code is in the windiff_cli directory.
The frontend is used to visualize the data generated by the CLI tool, in a user-friendly way. The frontend follows the same principle as ntdiff, as it allows browsing information extracted from official Microsoft PEs and PDBs for certain versions of Microsoft Windows and also allows comparing this information between versions. The frontend's code is in the windiff_frontend directory.
A scheduled GitHub action fetches new updates from Winbindex every day and updates the configuration file used to generate the live version of WinDiff. Currently, because of (free plans) storage and compute limitations, only KB and Insider Preview updates less than one year old are kept for the live version. You can of course rebuild a local version of WinDiff yourself, without those limitations if you need to. See the next section for that.
Note: Winbindex doesn't provide unique download links for 100% of the indexed files, so it might happen that some PEs' information are unavailable in WinDiff because of that. However, as soon as these PEs are on VirusTotal, Winbindex will be able to provide unique download links for them and they will then be integrated into WinDiff automatically.
The full build of WinDiff is "self-documented" in ci/build_frontend.sh, which is the build script used to build the live version of WinDiff. Here's what's inside:
FreshRSS 
# Resolve the project's root folder
PROJECT_ROOT=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
# Generate databases
cd "$PROJECT_ROOT/windiff_cli"
cargo run --release "$PROJECT_ROOT/ci/db_configuration.json" "$PROJECT_ROOT/windiff_frontend/public/"
# Build the frontend
cd "$PROJECT_ROOT/windiff_frontend"
npm ci
npm run buildThe configuration file used to generate the data for the live version of WinDiff is located here: ci/db_configuration.json, but you can customize it or use your own. PRs aimed at adding new binaries to track in the live configuration are welcome.
