Twitter: Insider’s claims reveal security nightmare
“Elon Musk is now the least of Twitter’s problems,” said Daniel Howley in Yahoo Finance. The social media company is “a security train wreck,” according to its former security chief, Peiter Zatko. In an explosive whistleblower complaint filed to numerous Washington regulatory agencies last week, Zatko claims “half of Twitter’s employees had access to sensitive user data,” but the company “wasn’t even following the most basic level of cybersecurity preparedness.” Many workers rarely updated their mobile devices, while the company’s servers ran on vulnerable and out-of-date software. The report may put Twitter in jeopardy with the Federal Trade Commission, which already hammered the company over lax security in 2011. Zatko also says Twitter executives hardly cared to know “how many bots are actually on the platform,” giving new credibility to Musk’s justifications for backing out of his $44 billion agreement to take Twitter private.
Twitter is poorly managed, said Katie Canales in Business Insider, and has been for a while. Co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “reputation as a visionary” was long ago “tainted by reports painting him as absent, uncommunicative, and indecisive.” Dorsey hired Zatko in 2020, after a teen hacker hijacked the verified Twitter accounts of some of Twitter’s highest-profile users—including Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, and (yes) Elon Musk. But Zatko indicates that Dorsey himself didn’t do much to improve the situation, saying the then-CEO was “disengaged” and would go missing “for weeks.” The big question is what this means for Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk, which goes to trial in October, said Barbara Ortutay and Tom Krisher in the Associated Press. It appears to “boost Musk’s claims on the spam bots issue,” although Musk will still need to prove the bot count is much worse than he knew when he signed the deal. But Dan Ives, a well-respected analyst at Wedbush, says Twitter should no longer expect “an easy win.” Musk should feel “like a kid waking up on Christmas morning,” Ives said.
Don’t be fooled into believing that Zatko has made Musk’s claims a slam dunk, said Matt Levine in Bloomberg. Musk doesn’t just say that Twitter has too many bots. He says that Twitter has defrauded advertisers (and Musk himself) by lying about it. But Zatko actually admits that Twitter “does a good job of excluding” those bots from the count it gives advertisers, just not of getting rid of them entirely. “That’s not fraud”— though maybe Musk can “spin some legal arguments” from Zatko’s account. If he succeeds, things may end up looking pretty good for Zatko, because “saving the richest person in the world $44 billion is a good career move.”