Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko told the US Congress on Tuesday that the platform ignored his security concerns, as its shareholders decide whether to approve a $44 billion takeover deal that Elon Musk is trying to exit.
“I’m here today because Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors,” Zatko, a hacker widely known as “Mudge” who was Twitter’s former security chief, told the hearing.
He said that, during his time as head of security for the platform from late 2020 until his dismissal in January this year, he tried to alert management to grave vulnerabilities to hacking or data theft, to no avail.
“They don’t know what data they have, where it lives, or where it came from. And so, unsurprisingly, they can’t protect it,” Zatko said during his opening remarks to the Judiciary Committee.
“Employees then have to have too much access (…) it doesn’t matter who has the keys if you don’t have any locks on the doors.”
Zatko testified that he brought concrete evidence of problems to the executive team and “repeatedly sounded the alarm”.
“To put it bluntly, Twitter leadership ignored its engineers because key…
