Peiter Zatko was a renowned hacker, popularly identified as Mudge, before he switched sides and became a technology security pioneer. His job was to put up barriers to prevent external intrusion, but now he has broken down walls and acts as a whistleblower or internal whistleblower, from the bowels of Twitter.
Zatko, fired as the messaging platform's chief security officer earlier this year, filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department accusing the company of violating agreements with the Federal Trade Commission. to maintain sound security practices.
A few weeks before the start of the trial in Delaware that pits Twitter against Elon Musk for his refusal to conclude the purchase agreement of the social network for 44,000 million dollars, the initiative of the former security chief may mean a turn in the cause. According to Zatko, company executives misled federal regulators and the company's own board of directors about "extreme and blatant deficiencies in its defense against hackers." They also made "little efforts to fight spam or bots from fake users, always based on the complaint of the former head of security.
This is precisely a key issue in Musk's backtracking on his purchase agreement. The owner of Tesla argued his refusal of the pact reached in April due to Twitter's lack of transparency and the concealment that there were many more false users than they recognized.
The complaint sounds like May rain for the millionaire of electric cars and space rockets after Twitter's judicial request that he be forced to execute the purchase.
The former hacker describes the company as a chaotic and rudderless business, consumed by infighting, unable to adequately protect its 238 million daily users, including government officials, heads of state and other influential public figures, such as Musk himself, who has more than 100 million followers, the most.
The most serious point is the alleged violation of the agreement with the Federal Trade Commission for "falsely" stating that it had a solid security plan.
Zatko says he warned his colleagues that half of the company's servers were running on antiquated or outdated protection systems, with vulnerable software. He accuses its managers of hiding terrible facts about the breaches, the number of breaches and the lack of protection of user data.
Instead, Twitter executives presented flashy graphs that measured
