Twitter is about to find out what it’s like to be Facebook after its former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday that is likely to lead to further investigations.
The complaint, which was first reported on by The Washington Post and CNN, alleged that Twitter has misled the Federal Trade Commission about its security standards, violated SEC rules, misrepresented itself to the board of directors and allowed foreign governments to infiltrate the platform.
In the complaint, Zatko accused Twitter of lying about bots to Elon Musk, failing to secure the company’s servers, withholding crucial details about breaches from its board and even succumbing to pressure from the Indian government to hire government agents and give them access to sensitive data. Zatko lays blame largely with former CEO Jack Dorsey, whom Zatko describes as “disengaged,” and current CEO Parag Agrawal, who the complaint alleges was defensive and in denial about the company’s security vulnerabilities.
“Mudge is proceeding with these disclosures quite reluctantly,” the complaint reads. “When ethical researchers find a vulnerability that bad actors can exploit, first they make a quiet ‘responsible disclosure’ so that the affected company or government can fix it. But sometimes the vulnerable institution doesn’t want to hear the truth.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to Protocol’s request for comment. In a statement to The Washington Post, spokesperson Rebecca Hahn said Zatko’s complaint was “riddled with inaccuracies” and accused Zatko of “opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter” after he was fired in early 2022.
Zatko joined Twitter in 2020, after a high-profile hack of the platform left the accounts of Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and others compromised.
Zatko’s bombshell complaint stretches 84 pages, and is already drawing questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, as well as regulators.
“The whistleblower’s allegations of widespread security failures at Twitter, willful misrepresentations by top executives to government agencies, and penetration of the company by foreign intelligence raise serious concerns. If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, promising to investigate the allegations further.
Allegation one: Twitter lied to Elon Musk about bots
Of all of Zatko’s allegations, this one will undoubtedly get the most attention. According to the complaint, Agrawal made “false and misleading statements” in a tweet that said Twitter employees are “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can.”
“Agrawal’s tweet is a lie,” the complaint reads. Zatko pointed to Twitter’s practice of reporting “monetizable daily active users” rather than total daily active users as masking the true number of spam bots on the platform.
“There are many millions of active accounts that are not considered ‘mDAU,’ either because they are spam bots, or because Twitter does not believe it can monetize them,” Zatko said in the complaint.
The number of bots on the platform is a key focal point of the ongoing battle between Musk and Twitter. Twitter sued Musk after the billionaire filed to walk out on his $44 billion bid to buy the company, citing Twitter’s “false and misleading statements” about bots.
Allegation two: The Indian government forced Twitter to hire two government agents
Zatko accused Twitter of being “complicit in threats to democratic governance.” Specifically, he alleged that the company succumbed to pressure from the Indian government to hire two of its agents and give them access to “vast amounts of Twitter’s sensitive data.”
The complaint also stated that a U.S. government source told Twitter that “one or more particular company employees were working on behalf of another particular foreign intelligence agency.” This allegation comes just weeks after a former Twitter employee was convicted for spying on behalf of the government of Saudi Arabia.
Allegation three: Twitter misled its own board about security vulnerabilities
Zatko accused Agrawal of outright enabling fraud in December 2021. According to the complaint, materials prepared for a board meeting suggested that 92% of computers had security software installed, but left out other stats which suggested that around 50% of those computers had “critical flaws” or had “disabled critical safety settings.”
The materials also included details that Zatko alleged were designed to convince the board that Twitter was successfully limiting the number of employees who had access to production systems, a vulnerability that had contributed to a major hack of the platform in 2020.
“The graph misleadingly [suggested] that Twitter was making significant progress in reducing access to production systems,” the complaint reads. “Mudge knew that the actual underlying data showed that at the end of 2021, 51% of the ~11 thousand full-time employees had privileged access to Twitter's production systems.” According to the complaint, that’s a 5% increase from February 2021.
The complaint also stated that the materials minimized the total number of security incidents Twitter experienced in 2021 and mischaracterized the number of events that could be traced back to these access control issues.
While Zatko alleged that he prevailed in preventing the materials from being presented to the entire board on Dec. 9, the complaint says the materials were presented to the board’s Risk Committee a week later.
Allegation four: Twitter’s data-center infrastructure was prone to an existential outage threat
Building the reliable and scalable computing infrastructure needed to support Twitter’s real-time service has been a challenge for the company since its earliest days, and as of the spring of 2021, Zatko said it remained in a perilous state.
Specifically, Twitter lacked a “workable disaster recovery plan” in the event of even a partial data-center outage, which is considered table stakes for most companies operating services at Twitter’s scale. Zatko also alleged that “the majority of the systems” in Twitter’s data centers were running out-of-date software, which could have contained serious security vulnerabilities, and that the company lacked the tools to properly understand the scope of the problem.
Twitter’s engineers were able to manage a period of instability in the spring of 2021 that could have led to what Zatko called a “Black Swan” event — which could have taken down its services for weeks or even months — but did not take steps to correct its problems in subsequent months, according to the document.
Allegation five: Twitter violated its consent decree with the FTC
Like we said, Twitter’s getting the Facebook treatment. In 2011, following a series of breaches in 2009, Twitter reached a consent decree with the FTC, through which it promised to make substantive changes to its security and privacy protocols. But the complaint alleges that when Zatko joined Twitter in 2020, following the infamous blue check hack, he found that “Twitter had never been in compliance” with the consent decree.
Specifically, the complaint alleges that Twitter conducted marketing campaigns using phone numbers and email addresses users provided for security purposes. Twitter has already been fined $150 million for this infraction. But the complaint also suggests that when the FTC asked whether Twitter deleted the data of users who canceled their accounts, the company replied merely that the accounts were “deactivated.” Actually, the complaint claims, Twitter found that the data “couldn’t even be accounted for.”
Tom Krazit contributed to this report.
