Whether Elon Musk ends up as the owner of Twitter after the dust settles and the trial ends on his contentious attempt at purchasing the social media company, it’s a good thing he took a run at it if for nothing more than pulling back the curtain on what is going on with that San Francisco based company.
The latest head-scratching and unsettling news about the inner workings of Twitter come from a whistleblower who is claiming that executives at Twitter are coving up their deficient security, and by doing that, they are jeopardizing the privacy of user’s data and are a risk to democracy.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko is the man making the claims about what’s wrong with Twitter’s security system. He is shining a spotlight directly on the board of directors and senior executives.
Referred to as an “ethical hacker,” Zatko is Twitter’s former head of security, and he unleashed his jaw-dropping news to Congress in a meeting with federal agencies in July. Now he’s come public, speaking to CNN and the Washington Post.
His claims include the fact that the Twitter board has been covering up its “extreme, egregious deficiencies” about how many bots and bogus accounts make up Twitter’s user base. He says the company truly has no clue how many are fake, and it poses a threat to national security because of the company’s cluelessness.
Zatko told Congress that, in his opinion, Twitter prioritized growing as opposed to fighting spam, and the procedures they had in place to combat the bots were a joke.
Wait, there’s more. He said the company is so mismanaged that thousands of employees have access to sensitive information with little oversight.
As for CEO Parag Agrawal, well, he’s already considered weak as a leader and in over his head, and Zatko said it’s worse. He accused the CEO of lying last May when he tweeted that Twitter was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can.”
Twitter released a statement accusing Zatko of being a disgruntled employee and said he had been fired earlier this year for ineffective leadership and performance. Twitter hired him in 2020 after a breach where hackers controlled the accounts of Joe Biden, Musk, and Barack Obama.
What happens next? Zatko’s claims could be the impetus for Musk to get out of the deal and lead to billions in potential fines for Twitter if what he said is proven true.
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