Twitter Hires Top Hacker Peiter Zatko To Head Security

Twitter Hires Top Hacker Peiter Zatko To Head Security
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Social media giant Twitter, amidst increased threat of regulation and serious security breaches, is appointing one of the world’s top-most among hackers Peiter Zatko, widely known by his hacker handle Mudge, to tackle everything from engineering missteps to misinformation.

In July, a group of young hackers was said to have tricked employees and won access to internal tools, which enable them to change account settings and then tweet from the accounts of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk.

Read Also: Twitter Shuts Iran-Based Network Fanning Flames Of US Protests

Zatko, widely known by his hacker handle Mudge, was announced as head of security by the company on Monday, giving him a broad mandate to recommend changes in structure and practices. He answers to CEO Jack Dorsey and is expected to take over management of key security functions after a 45- to 60-day review. In an exclusive interview, Zatko said he will examine ‘information security, site integrity, physical security, platform integrity — which starts to touch on abuse and manipulation of the platform — and engineering.’

Zatko most recently oversaw security at the electronic payments unicorn Stripe. Before that, he worked on special projects at Google and oversaw handing out grants for projects on cyber-security at the Pentagon’s famed Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA). Zatko’s colorful career began in the 1990s, when he simultaneously conducted classified work for a government contractor and was among the leaders of Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacking group notorious for releasing Windows hacking tools in order to goad Microsoft into improving security.

Also, Dan Kaufman who supervised Zatko at DARPA and now leads the advanced products group at Google said: ‘I don’t know if anyone can fix Twitter’s security, but he’d be at the top of my list.’

Twitter faces numerous security challenges. A year ago, the U.S. government accused two men of spying for Saudi Arabia when they worked at Twitter year’s earlier, saying that they passed along private information about the kingdom’s critics.

Zatko said he was committed to improving public conversations on Twitter. He praised a recent move to increase ‘friction’ by prompting users to comment instead of simply retweeting; a next step could be to force people to understand a long conversation before participating in it, he said. Zatko said he appreciated Twitter’s openness to unconventional security approaches, such as his proposal for confusing bad actors by manipulating the data they receive from Twitter about how people interact with their posts.
Talking about his new employer Zatko said; ‘They are willing to take some risks.’

‘With the challenges of algorithms and algorithmic bias, they are not standing by and waiting until someone else solves the problem.’

 

AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK

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