Twitter Concealed Known Security Flaws
US social media giant Twitter has been accused of hiding major security flaws. A whistleblower has spken out to accuse Twitter of consistently lying to customers and government officials about its attempts to repair its users data security.
While caught up in a legal battle against Elon Musk, Twitter’s former security chief until January of this year has blown the whistle on how the social media platform handles cyber security.
Former Chief Security Officer, Peiter Zatko, has accused Twitter of severe cyber security mismanagement in a complaint filed to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed on July 6. Zatko alleges that the company has been hiding the spam and bots problem which began to emerge in the dispute between the social media giant and Elon Musk.
Twitter does not know how many fake, bots or spam automated accounts it has, according to allegations by its former head of security.
Peiter Zatko's is one of the world’s most famous hackers and leading cyber security experts and has now become a whistleblower and submitted a string of allegations of repeated security violations by his former employer Twitter.
Peiter Zatko's revelations, have been seized upon by lawyers for Elon Musk, who is trying to end his bid to buy Twitter, disputing its information on the number of fake accounts it has.
Twitter says Zatko's allegations contain many inaccuracies and inconsistencies and that he was sacked in January for ineffective leadership and poor performance.
Twitter has been in a dispute with Musk since the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s decided to abandon a deal to purchase the site for $44 billion earlier this year. Musk said he no longer wished to purchase the company, as he could not verify how many humans were on the platform, while Twitter says it estimates that fewer than 5% of its daily active users are bot accounts.
Musk has said the social media company is heavily undercounting the number of spam and bot accounts on its platform as a primary reason he’s backing out.
According to Zatko, Twitter's management have little incentive to accurately identify or report total spam bots on the platform. In a redacted copy of the SEC filing seen by CBS news, Zatko criticises Twitter's methodology for calculating the number of spam-bots. He claims he was unable to obtain from Twitter an "upper bound" for the number of bots, accusing senior management of having "no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bots".
- According to the Washington Post, the complaint "provides little hard evidence" to back up his assertions about bots and spam, although these allegations may be useful to Musk in his legal argument to withdraw from buying Twitter.
- According to Mr Zatko's lawyer, he started the whistleblowing process before Musk began his attempts to buy the platform became public, and has made no contact with Musk.
- Alex Spiro, an attorney for Musk, told CNN it had issued a subpoena for Mr Zatko to be a potential witness.
Twitter's server infrastructure is another equally serious vulnerability, the SEC filing claims. About half of the company's 500,000 servers run on outdated software that does not support basic security features such as encryption for stored data or regular security updates by vendors.
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