(RightIsRight.co) – The former head of security at Twitter, now turned whistleblower, has made shocking revelations about the social media platform during testimony before the United States Senate, including the presence of foreign spies and company employees’ ability to tweet from any profile.
The Senate testimony of Twitter whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko came after, back in July, he filed a complaint with three US federal agencies alleging the huge social media platform lacks basic user security.
Zatko is a former hacker who Twitter hired as a security chief before getting axed back in January by the company’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal.
During his Senate testimony, the whistleblower revealed that about 3,500 – 4,000 Twitter employees who are classified as engineers have access at any time to live user data all over the social media platform, including geolocation data.
“They would have access to the production environment. If they spent the time to meander around and look around, they would find that they could access these large flows of data… I know that Twitter has IP locations and that they do use geolocation services based upon IP addresses,” Zatko said.
He also revealed that Twitter could not track possible foreign spies who may have infiltrated the company as employees.
“They simply lacked the fundamental abilities to hunt for foreign intelligence agencies and expel them on their own,” the whistleblower said.
He spoke of one person whom he “believed with high confidence” was an agent of the government of India.
Zatko revealed further that Twitter collects much more information on each one of its users than was previously believed by the public.
He informed of a case in which a user harassed a Twitter executive, so Zatko went ahead and pulled a copious amount of information on the user to determine whether there was any real danger to the company employee.
“It only took… maybe 10 minutes… to say, ‘here’s who they are.’ This is the address where they live. This is where they are physically at this moment. They’re on their phone. We know their phone number. We also know all of the other accounts that they’ve tried to set up on the system and hide, and we know who they are on the other social media platforms as well,” the whistleblower recalled.
Zatko claimed further that Twitter engineers could send out tweets on behalf of any user of the platform – although he said he hasn’t “directly” witnessed that happening.
“A Twitter engineer understanding how the running systems and the data flows were operating, could then access and inject or put forward information. As I mentioned in my oral statement, as any of the senators sitting here today,” the whistleblower said.
What is your opinion? Do you trust Twitter’s security? Please share your thoughts by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the Twitter whistleblower who previously served as the company’s head of security, testified before the Senate yesterday — here at four key takeaways from his testimony. https://t.co/cS5JZtwyNo
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 14, 2022
