Twitter accuser did not fit into 140 characters – Hi-Tech – Kommersant
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The former head of security for the microblogging service Twitter, the once-famous hacker Peter (Maj) Zatko, spoke in the US Senate yesterday. He accused the company of sloppiness in storing user data, poor screening of new hires, and putting its own interests and profits ahead of those of its users. Mr. Zatko’s testimony could be one of the most serious grounds for terminating the deal between Elon Musk and Twitter.
Testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee came after Peter Zatko sent letters in July to three federal agencies – the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as to the US Congress. In them, he said that Twitter violated its own established rules of work, put its own interests and profit above the interests of its users, refused to correct violations, and simply fired the people who pointed to them (in this case, Zatko himself).
In the 1990s, Peter Zatko was better known by his nickname Mudge among hackers. He was a member of one of the first hacker groups, the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), which got its name from the fact that initially young hackers gathered on the site of a former slaughterhouse of one of the Texas farms. Mr. Zatko became famous as an authoritative expert in the field of computer security, spoke at numerous Internet conferences. In 1998, along with other hackers and computer security specialists, at special hearings in the US Senate, he spoke about the main vulnerabilities of the Internet of that time. Soon Peter Zatko began to be invited to work by large corporations such as Google and Motorola. He even managed to work for the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA). In November 2020, he was hired by the founder of the company, Jack Dorsey, who was then its CEO, to work at Twitter. True, in November 2021, Dorsey stepped down as head of Twitter, and a few months later, in January 2022, Peter Zatko was also fired from the company.
Letters sent by Peter Zatko to federal agencies became known only in August. After that, Elon Musk, against whom Twitter filed a lawsuit for refusing to buy it for $44 billion, said he wanted to bring Peter Zatko as a witness on his side. According to Musk, Mr. Zatko’s words confirm the reasons for the gross violations on Twitter, because of which the billionaire refused to buy the company.
How declared Yesterday, Mr. Zatko, Twitter’s security systems are so poorly organized that the company itself does not know whether any user data has been permanently deleted or not. All this is due to the fact that Twitter poorly or does not track how and where this data is stored.
“They just don’t know what data they have, where it’s located, and where it’s coming from. It is not surprising that they simply cannot protect them somehow, ”said the former head of the security service.
Another major flaw in Twitter’s work, the former hacker believes is that too many employees of the company have access to confidential customer information, and among these employees there are those who should not have such access. “There it doesn’t matter at all who has the keys to certain doors,” Mr. Zatko told the senators. “All engineers are given access to the testing system in real conditions by default, but this should not be. Such powers should be given to a narrower group of specialists.”
The former top manager of Twitter also criticized American regulators. In his opinion, the fines and punishments imposed on the company by regulators are too small and do not force managers to correct the situation properly. “When I worked there, they only cared about the amount of the fine or the risk of being subjected to some kind of systemic restructuring. But the fines that were imposed on them were of little concern there,” Mr. Zatko noted. Recall that in May, Twitter was fined US regulators for $150 million for the illegal collection and transfer to third parties of user contact information – phone numbers and email addresses. According to authorities, this happened between 2013 and 2019.
Mr Zatko also accused Twitter in carelessness and disregard for the interests of national security. According to him, the system for checking new employees is designed in such a way that it will not be a problem for a foreign spy to get a job there, who can gain access to huge arrays of confidential user data.
Mr. Zatko told senators that a week before he was fired, in January of this year, the FBI told the company’s security service that there was at least one agent of the Chinese Ministry of Security among the employees.
“When I found out about this, I was very upset,” Mr. Zatko emphasized. “But at the same time, I was not surprised, that’s how the system works there.” According to him, in addition to Chinese agents, an agent of the Indian authorities also penetrated Twitter. According to Mr. Zatko, the Twitter management itself did not take any steps to detect foreign agents in their company, and only starts to worry about something when they receive a warning from the special services: “All this reminds me of a conversation with one of the leaders, when I told him : “I’m sure we have a foreign agent working for us.” To which he replied: “Well, since we already have one, what if there is someone else?”
The American media and experts are still at a loss as to what the revelations of the former hacker and top manager of Twitter can lead to. The company itself reacted to the Senate hearing by issuing a statement. “The past hearings only confirm the fact that Mr. Zatko’s accusations are replete with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” the Twitter press service said.
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