Bulletins

Twitter's security heads are leaving in continued leadership shakeup

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced in a companywide note that the two renowned security experts, Rinki Sethi and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, would be leaving the company.

Twitter

Twitter's two security leaders joined the company after a widespread hack of public accounts, including Joe Biden's and Bill Gates'.

Photo: Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash

Twitter's new CEO has continued to shake up company leadership, announcing Wednesday that both Rinki Sethi and Peiter Zatko — better known as Mudge — would leave their roles as chief information security officer and head of Security, respectively.

Zatko has already left the company and Sethi will leave in the coming weeks, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Protocol. According to the staff-wide memo reviewed by the New York Times, their departure is due to "an assessment of how the organization was being led and the impact on top priority work." Twitter declined to comment further on their departure, citing company policy on employment and privacy.

Almost immediately after becoming CEO in December, Agrawal decided to restructure the leadership team, resulting in the departure of Dantley Davis, the former head of Design, and Michael Montano, the former head of Engineering.

Both Sethi and Zatko were hired to help revamp Twitter's security procedures in the fall of 2020, after a group of young hackers managed to get access to prominent public-facing accounts like Bill Gates' and Joe Biden's, as well as many others. The federal government is also investigating two former Twitter employees for spying for the Saudi Arabian government inside the company.

Sethi and Zatko did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This story was updated with comments from Twitter.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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