A former head of security of Twitter, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, alleges that Twitter violated the terms of an 11 year old settlement with the FTC by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan.
Zatko, made this known when he filed a whistle-blower complaint to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), accusing the social media platform company of “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its practices around spam and hacker attacks.
The FTC deal prohibited Twitter from “misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorised access to nonpublic information and honour the privacy choices made by consumers.” for 20 years.
The former staff of Twitter also claims he had raised concerns that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software.
Zatko accuses Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives and directors of “extensive legal violations”. These span public misleading statements to users, misrepresentations to investors and acting with “negligence and even complicity” toward efforts by foreign governments to infiltrate the platform.
In the complaint, Zatko claimed that on December 14, 2021, Agrawal “explicitly instructed Mudge to provide documents which both of them knew to be misleading.” He followed that in January, he started gathering evidence of “fraud,” and Twitter’s chief compliance officer opened an investigation based on his allegations.
Zatko joined Twitter in late 2020 and was terminated by the company in January. The company claims that Zatko was dismissed for claims of poor performance.
According to reports, a spokesperson for the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee, Rachel Cohen, said the committee has received the complaint and “is in the process of setting up a meeting to discuss the allegations in further detail. We take this matter seriously.”
This complaint comes as Tesla CEO, Elon Musk and Twitter are embroiled in a legal battle. Musk had called off his $44 billion agreement to buy the social media company, accusing Twitter of lying about the true number of bot and spam accounts on the platform.