Twitter Whistleblower Claims Platform Has Cataclysmic Security Problems

The Washington PostA former Twitter executive says the social-media platform has monumental security issues that could have ramifications for national security, democracy, and the privacy of all of its users.After being fired from Twitter earlier this year, Peiter Zatko eschewed writing a customarily salty Glassdoor review and instead sent a blistering report on the site’s vulnerabilities to Congress and multiple federal agencies. The former head of the site’s security—who is known in the cybersecurity world by his alias “Mudge”—paints a damning picture of an incompetently run company that gives an alarming number of employees access to the site’s fundamental controls and sensitive data, according to CNN and The Washington Post, which have seen Zatko’s complaint.As well as alleging that Twitter is insufficiently protecting its estimated 238 million daily users—which include world leaders, captains of industry, and other influential public figures—Zatko also claims that one or more employees may in fact work for foreign intelligence services. He further alleges that the most senior executives at the company have worked to cover up the scale of Twitter’s vulnerabilities, and that they have been misleading about the number of spam bots on the platform.Read more at The Daily Beast.