What the Twitter whistleblower could mean for Elon Musk's takeover deal

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Elon Musk's monthslong effort to buy — and then to get out of buying — Twitter has been marked by a range of unexpected twists. Now, a stunning whistleblower disclosure from the company's former security lead Peiter Zatko is almost certain to become the latest complication.

that the company might be significantly under-reporting the number of spam and fake accounts, although he had little apparent evidence beyond his own experience on the platform to support the claim. He has made the issue central to the legal fight over the US$44 billion acquisition, even as

Zatko, better known as "Mudge," is a prominent ethical hacker-turned-cybersecurity executive whose career also included stops at Google and the Department of Defense. He was hired as Twitter's security lead following a major hack at the company in 2020 and fired in January of this year, a move he claims came after he tried to blow the whistle internally about security deficiencies and alleged possible fraud by the company's senior leaders.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Tuesday wrote an internal memo to employees, obtained by CNN, vowing to challenge the allegations in the disclosure and seeking to reassure employees, calling the allegations "frustrating and confusing to read." Zatko began documenting his concerns about misleading statements made to Twitter's board regarding security in December; Musk first reported his large stake in Twitter on April 4, before agreeing to acquire it later that month.In February 2019, Twitter announced it would start using a new metric to quantify the size of its audience when the company reported its financial results each quarter.

Twitter's systems to measure and remove bots also consist of "mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed and reactive human teams," the disclosure states.say it can be difficult to quantify bots because there isn't a widely agreed upon definition of the term, because humans can sometimes be behind fake and spam accounts, and because bad actors constantly change their tactics.

In the disclosure, Zatko alleges that without more context, it's hard to fully understand the figures Twitter reports about taking down spam and fake accounts. The disclosure questions whether the number "is a lot or a little, for a platform as vast as Twitter? No one knows because there is no denominator provided for context.

Twitter did not respond to specific questions about the risk of data center outages, but said it continuously invests in its teams and technology to ensure the platform's security. And a source close to the matter told CNN that the platform had systems in place to address privacy, security and health-related risks for years before Zatko joined the company that have continued since his departure.

 

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When you cannot prove your data submitted is more than a guess; IF you cannot prove 5% for SEC investigations; then such Legal problems at twitter are a significant material Breach

Media tried to smear Musk but it looks again that those darn 'Conspiracy theorists' were right.....yet again.

No idea why Musk got involved with such a ridiculous idea in the first place.

I wonder how much Musk paid him to write up these pages.

Let's start of with the fact that elonmusk was right...

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