Peiter Zatko who is the Twitter whistleblower has finally landed in the United States Congress on Tuesday where he revealed that the platform had initially ignored some of his security concerns, in a testimony that came as company shareholders greenlit Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover deal.
It has also been reported that nearly 99 percent of the votes which had been cast by some of the stock owners had fully endorsed the agreement which had been made with Musk to sell him the tech firm for $54.20 per share, Twitter said in a release.
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Twitter had also added that it had been ready to consummate the merger agreement immediately, and no later than September 15 as per a timeline mandated by the agreement and the shareholder decision clears the way for the contract to close, even as billionaire Musk tries to exit it. Twitter has sued him to force it through.
“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”, 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 alerting management to grave vulnerabilities to hacking or data theft — but 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.
He contended that employees across the company had too much access to user data.
Zatko testified that he brought evidence of problems to the executive team and “repeatedly sounded the alarm”.
“To put it bluntly, Twitter leadership ignored its engineers because key parts of leadership lacked the competency to understand the scope of the problem,” he said.
“But more importantly, their executive incentives led them to prioritize profits over security.”
Zatko’s attorneys called the hearing a “watershed moment” that he hopes will enlighten the public and contribute to sorely needed legislation aimed at tech platforms.
Twitter has dismissed the 51-year-old’s complaint as being without merit but it had also been reported that some of the revelations of his whistleblower report in the United States press in August had been perfectly timed for Tesla chief Musk, who has used it as part of his justification for abandoning his unsolicited $44 buyout bid.