Vulnerabilities, fake accounts: a whistleblower accuses Twitter of lying

Published on: 08/24/2022 – 00:53 Twitter allegedly concealed vulnerabilities in its protection system and lied about its fight against fake accounts, according to a complaint to US regulators by the former network security chief social worker, Peiter Zatko, who presents himself as a whistleblower. However, the question of fake accounts is at the heart of a legal dispute between Twitter and Elon Musk. Twitter misled US regulators about its ability to defend itself against hackers and fake accounts, according to a complaint filed by Twitter’s former security chief, who poses as a whistleblower. 84-page document addressed last month to several American authorities and revealed Tuesday August 23 by the Washington Post and CNN, Peiter Zatko denounces “serious and shocking failures, willful ignorance and threats to national security and democracy “. Peiter Zatko mentions in particular obsolete servers, software vulnerable to computer attacks and claims that Twitter executives have sought to hide the number of hacking attempts from US authorities as well as from members of the board of directors. Twitter rejects the charges Charges rejected by Twitter, which ensures that security and data protection are among its priorities. The complaint is “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies”, says the social network in a message to AFP. The company is also directly attacking its former manager, accusing him of having chosen “an opportune moment” to “draw attention” and “damage Twitter, its customers and its shareholders”. failures on security, the latter indeed affirms that the company has constantly favored the growth of its number of users to the fight against spam and bots. In particular, he describes as a lie a tweet published in May by the boss of the platform, Parag Agrawal, assuring that Twitter was doing everything to detect and remove spam as quickly as possible. Legal battle with Elon Musk This question is at the heart of the legal battle which opposes Twitter to Elon Musk, the billionaire who has repeatedly accused the company of minimizing the proportion of fake accounts and spam, evaluated at 5% by the platform.Elon Musk is counting on this argument to justify the abandonment of his plan to buy Twitter for $44 billion and avoid paying severance pay.”We have previously subpoenaed Mr. Zatko and find his dismissal and that of other key employees strange in light of what we have discovered,” said Alex Spiro, one of Elon Musk’s lawyers, in an email to AFP. The entrepreneur, for his part, reacted by posting, on Twitter, a drawing of the cartoon character Jiminy Crickets ifflotant, an allusion to the English word designating whistleblowers. Former hackerFormer hacker known by the nickname “Mudge”, Peiter Zatko was hired at the end of 2020 by the co-founder and ex-boss of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, after the hacking of the accounts of many personalities (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk , Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, etc). According to Twitter, he was fired due to “ineffective leadership and poor performance.” “False”, answer his lawyers: he was fired “just two weeks” after a confrontation with Parag Agrawal on security issues. He is helped in his efforts by the association for the protection of whistleblowers, Whistleblower Aid , who has already defended Frances Haugen, a former computer scientist at Facebook whose revelations had tarnished the reputation of the social networking giant last fall. “If these accusations are true, they may raise concerns about data protection and security risks for Twitter users around the world,” influential Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said in a statement. The complaint also shows that the weakness of the platform’s response to disinformation is “extraordinary”, said Paul Barrett, specialist in the impact of social networks on democracy at New York University NYU. According to the document, Twitter “has only hired two experts dedicated to misinformation, employs few people who speak languages ​​other than English, and relies primarily on moderators lacking the cultural and geographic knowledge to identify disinformation, he denounces in a message sent to AFP. With AFP and Reuters