Zatko placed the blame for Twitter's vulnerabilities squarely on a leadership team that he described as reactive, incompetent, and motivated by profit over safety.

Zatko pins Twitter's failures on leaders, starting with CEO Parag Agrawal Twitter says its hiring process is independent of foreign influence. 'Their response was, 'Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more?'' 'I'm reminded of one conversation with an executive when I said, 'I am confident that we have a foreign agent,'' Zatko recalled.

The company was 'unwilling to put the effort in' to hunt down bad actors within its ranks, he said. He testified that Twitter struggled to identify potential infiltration by foreign agents and typically was only able to do so when notified by outside agencies. Zatko also alleged that the Indian government had placed an agent inside Twitter. 'If you are not placing foreign agents inside Twitter - because it's very difficult to detect them it is very valuable to a foreign agent to be inside there - as a foreign intelligence company, you're most likely not doing your job,' he said. Zatko said while he found that disturbing, given 'the state of the environment at Twitter,' he was not surprised. Zatko alleged the company is highly vulnerable to abuse by foreign intelligence agents - but is unable or unwilling to root them out.Ī week before his firing in January, he testified, the FBI told Twitter's security team that at least one agent from China's Ministry of State Security was on the company's payroll. Twitter was warned it hired a Chinese spy Here are five takeaways from the hearing: Zatko's allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,' a company spokesperson said in a statement. 'It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room,' he warned.Īfter the hearing, Twitter pushed back against Zatko's claims. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused. In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. The billionaire has seized on Zatko's claims of as further justification for walking away from the purchase without penalty. Zatko's disclosures have also thrown a new twist into Twitter's legal battle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is trying to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company. His allegations have raised alarm bells in Washington, given Twitter's role as a place where government leaders, dissidents and businesses go to get their message out. In an 84-page federal whistleblower complaint made public last month, he accused the company of practicing lax security, neglecting user privacy, violating a 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, and knowingly employing foreign government agents who had access to internal systems and data. Zatko, who's also known by his hacker name, Mudge, was hired to lead security at Twitter in 2020, after teenaged hackers took over high-profile verified accounts. 'The company's cybersecurity failures make it vulnerable to exploitation, causing real harm to real people.' 'Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors,' Peiter Zatko testified during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Twitter executives put profits ahead of security, leaving the door open to infiltration by foreign agents and hackers, the company's former head of security told Congress on Tuesday.

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