Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko, Twitter's former security chief, offered Congress a litany of alleged issues within the company.
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A respected longtime figure within the hacking and infosec communities testified in front of Congress yesterday on a number of grave whistleblower complaints filed against his former employer, Twitter. Among other damning issues, Peiter Zatko (known as “Mudge” in the cybersecurity world), who was Twitter’s security lead from July 2020 to January 2022 , claimed that the FBI once warned the major social media platform it had unwittingly hired a Chinese spy as an employee, alongside similar incidents with both Indian and Saudi Arabian agents. Zatko also alleged that the accounts of every member of Congress—and the wider public, for that matter—were highly susceptible to cyberattacks at any moment given major lapses in Twitter’s security protocols.
“It doesn’t matter who has keys if you don’t have any locks on the doors. It’s not far-fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators in this room,” Zatko said during at one point during his nearly two-and-a-half hour testimony. During his interview, he also explained that Twitter’s estimated 4,000 engineers have consistent access to private user data such as phone numbers and IP addresses. As such, they are in prime positions for infiltration from bad actors and hostile foreign governments
Zatko, a former Department of Defense employee, also alleges that Twitter...
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