WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Twitter Inc.’s former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who has accused the social media company of misleading regulators, met staff in the office of U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal this week to discuss his whistleblower complaint, said two sources familiar with the situation.
Zatko, who accused Twitter of falsely claiming it had a solid security plan and making misleading statements about its defenses against hackers and spam accounts, discussed his complaint with Blumenthal’s staff.
Blumenthal, a Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee with a keen interest in Big Tech, wrote in a letter to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan: “According to disclosures and evidence provided by Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, a highly-respected cybersecurity expert who served as Twitter’s Security Lead from 2020 to 2022, Twitter executives allegedly failed to address significant security vulnerabilities, neglected the mishandling of personal data, and ignored known privacy risks to users for more than a decade.”
Blumenthal called for an FTC investigation in the letter.
In an 84-page complaint Zatko, a famed hacker widely known as “Mudge,” alleged Twitter prioritized user growth over reducing spam, with executives eligible to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam, according to documents relayed by congressional investigators.
Twitter labeled the complaint a “false narrative.”
(Reporting by Chris Sanders and Raphael Satter; Editing by Howard Goller)
