Whistleblower: Twitter Lacks Ability to Detect, Expel Foreign Agents in Its Ranks

pcmag.com:

Twitter is wide open to foreign interference from the inside due to the unfettered access employees have to critical systems, a former executive testified on Capitol Hill today.

Former Twitter security chief Pieter Zatko, also known as Mudge, detailed(Opens in a new window) his concerns before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, reiterating that he believes "Twitter’s unsafe handling of the data of its users and its inability or unwillingness to truthfully represent issues to its board of directors and regulators have created real risk to tens of millions of Americans, the American democratic process, and America’s national security.

"Further, I believe that Twitter’s willingness to purposely mislead regulatory agencies violates Twitter’s legal obligations and cannot be ethically condoned," he added.

Those risks include Twitter's inability to detect bad actors within its ranks. According to Zatko, who worked at Twitter from 2020 to 2022, the company usually only became aware of Twitter employees who were actually foreign agents when they were alerted to their presence by an outside agency like the FBI.

Twitter "simply lacked the fundamental abilities to hunt for foreign intelligence agencies and expel them on their own," according to Zatko.

Twitter couldn't track down foreign agents because they didn't have centralized logging and access controls, which effectively gave far too many employees direct access to critical systems with little oversight, Zatko said. This includes data like who logged in and what they were doing.

"Later on in my tenure, I learned that there were thousands of failed attempts to access internal systems that were happening per week and nobody was noticing," Zatko said. "This fundamental