Former Twitter security chief Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging the company lied to its board and even regulators in regards to our spaceman son Elon’s buyout.
Zatko’s complaint alleges Twitter purposefully misled regulators on their bad security practices, as well as with their notoriously bad spam problem.
The new complaint was filed with the SEC, DOJ, and FTC, where Zatko claims the company doesn’t follow basic security guidances and focuses on user growth more than anything else.
Zatko, who was fired not long after Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO, claims Twitter has “extreme, egregious deficiencies.”
Further, Zatko said current CEO Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he said they’re fighting spam. Zatko describes Twitter as a clueless company mostly crippled by staff infighting and the inability of protecting its users and their data.
Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk was quick to respond to the whistleblower, saying “spam prevalence *was* shared with the board, but the board chose not disclose that to the public…”
When Musk began meeting with Twitter staff and looking at their internal reports he immediately began questioning how accurate their spam numbers are – leading to his threat of walking from the deal and legal agreement.
Shortly after the complains were filed, Elon’s legal team reportedly issued a subpoena for Zatko, and the next day Zatko was confirmed to testify in Congress on the entire ordeal.
A serious accusation in the filing claims Twitter violated an 11-year old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by lying when they claimed to have a reliable and planned security policy.
Zatko even notes he warned co-workers that half of their servers were running on outdated and therefore vulnerable software, with numerous security holes.
Yet another even greater accusation is that “thousands” of Twitter employees have wide-reaching, high-level access to everything within a user’s account – including their phone numbers, addresses, and more.
Since these employees and their critical access to core software is reportedly poorly tracked, this has led to embarassing breaches and hacks.
The ex-security chief claims company execs would hide when breaches happened, as well as the nonexistent user data protection, instead opting to show directors presentations with useless changes or positive growth.
Zatko even went so far as claiming execs that managed to increase their concurrent users could earn individual bonuses of up to $10 million.
The former Twitter security boss said his reasoning behind making his whistleblower complaint was that he “felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take.”
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