A former executive at Twitter alleged that the social media company had lackluster cybersecurity safeguards, according to a whistleblower report obtained by CNN and The Washington Post.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the company’s former head of security who reported directly to the CEO, claimed that leadership misled board members and government officials about potential vulnerabilities that left the platform open to hacking, foreign manipulation, and spying. He also claimed that one or more current employees are working for a foreign intelligence agency.
“All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did,” Zatko wrote. “Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.”
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Zatko claimed that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who entered his position upon the exit of Jack Dorsey last year, discouraged Zatko from accurately reporting cybersecurity shortfalls to the board of directors and instead told him to offer misrepresented data.
The whistleblower disclosure totaled roughly 200 pages and was sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice, as well as multiple congressional committees. Twitter rejected the claims of the report, which CNN obtained from a senior Democratic staffer, and said that Zatko was fired due to “ineffective leadership and poor performance” earlier this year.
Read more: Daily Wire
