According to a whistleblower, Twitter has “severe, egregious weaknesses” in its security that pose a serious threat to democracy and national security.
The shocking information was revealed to Congress and federal agencies last month by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the social media company’s former head of security.
According to him, the tech company is horribly mismanaged, CNN reported, with too many employees having access to key systems and the most private data being handled without enough oversight.
The shocking revelation was made to Congress and federal agencies last month by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the social media company’s former head of security.
Pictured in 1998 giving testimony on government computer security at a Senate Governmental Affairs hearing is Mudge.
Senior executives, according to Zatko, who reported directly to the CEO, have been hiding the platform’s biggest vulnerabilities. He even suggested that one or more employees may be working for foreign intelligence services.
The whistleblower said that managers had lied to the board and authorities about the system’s security holes, which left it open to hacking, manipulation, and misinformation.
Zatko also said that Twitter executives lack the tools to determine how many bots are on the service, which will support Elon Musk’s legal argument.
The CEO of Tesla allegedly said that the site had not been accurate about the amount of bots and fraudulent accounts among its 238 million daily active users, and he later pulled out of his $44 billion buyout agreement.
Additionally, Zatko said that even when an account is deactivated, Twitter often fails to remove user data because staff members have forgotten about it.
He was hired in 2020 and was one of the most well-known hackers in the world. He was asked to provide recommendations for Twitter’s organisational and operational improvements to improve security.
He said at the time that he would look at “engineering,” “information security,” “site integrity,” “physical security,” platform integrity—which begins to touch on misuse and manipulation of the platform—and engineering.”
However, the business stated that his poor performance led to his firing in January.
The cyber whiz said that before going public, he made an effort to alert the board of the security flaws.
Mudge discussed the significant vulnerabilities of the Internet at the time in 1998 testimony before a Senate committee.
Famous hacker Mudge claimed to be able to shut down the internet in 30 minutes before Congress about 20 years ago.
Peiter Zatko, better known by his hacker alias Mudge, was a founding member of the pioneering Boston hacker collective the L0pht and the enduring computer and cultural hacking collective Cult of the Dead Cow.
He oversaw a grant programme for computer security initiatives run by the Defense Department more recently.
Mudge made a big contribution to revealing and educating the public about information and security vulnerabilities when he was a part of the L0pht.
Mudge obtained a post in 2010 managing the cyber security research at the government organisation Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Mudge started working at Google in 2013 in the Advanced Technology & Projects group.
Mudge, a talented guitarist who was born in December 1970, graduated first in his class from the Berklee College of Music.
Mudge was in charge of preliminary investigation on the buffer overflow security flaw.
One of the first members of the hacker community to approach the public sector and business was Mudge. He was in high demand as a public speaker and gave presentations at both hacker conferences like DEF CON and academic conferences like USENIX.
He was one of the seven members of L0pht who testified in front of a Senate committee in 1998 regarding the grave security flaws in the Internet at the time.
He was asked to meet with President Bill Clinton at a security meeting with cabinet members and business leaders in 2000, after the first debilitating Internet distributed denial-of-service attacks.
In 2004, he joined the technical advisory board of NFR Security as well as the federal contractor BBN Technologies, where he had previously worked in the 1990s as a division scientist.
His appointment as the project manager of a DARPA initiative to oversee cyber security research was announced in 2010.
He made the announcement that he will leaving DARPA in 2013 to take a job at Google ATAP.
In 2015, Zatko made the following Twitter announcement: “I’m joining #CyberUL,” a White House-mandated testing organisation for computer security that was inspired by Underwriters Laboratories.