Whistleblower Says Indian Government 'Agent' Was Placed in Twitter to Gauge Company's Plans

[SBFNews]

Whistleblower Says Indian Government 'Agent' Was Placed in Twitter to Gauge Company's Plans​

Twitter "simply lacked the fundamental abilities to hunt for foreign intelligence agencies and expel them on their own", Peiter Zatko told the US Senate on Tuesday.

4 hours ago | The Wire Staff

A former security officer at Twitter told senators on Tuesday that he learned a Chinese intelligence agent was on the social media company's payroll a week before he was dismissed.

It was just one of a string of vulnerabilities unveiled by Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko, a respected cybersecurity expert.

He was hired in November 2020 after a hack that compromised high-profile accounts but was fired barely a year later.

Such were the security failings, he said he was not surprised to learn that an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security was operating inside Twitter.

'I had been told because the corporate security physical security team had been contacted and told that there was at least one agent of the MSS, which is one of China's intelligence services, on the payroll inside Twitter,' he told a hearing of the Senate Judicial Committee.

'While it was disturbing to hear, I and many others, recognising the state of the environment at Twitter, were really thinking if you are not placing foreign agents inside Twitter - because it's very difficult to detect them ... it is very valuable to a foreign agent to be inside there - as a foreign intelligence company, you're most likely not doing your job.'

In his testimony to the US Senate, whistleblower Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko on Tuesday disclosed that the person he believed with high confidence was a ‘foreign agent’ of India was placed in Twitter to see if the company was willing to concede to the BJP government’s demands for censorship and better understand its plans.In a damning testimony, Twitter’s former security chief said that the company ignored its engineers because their “executive incentives led them to prioritise profit over security.” Zatko said Twitter’s security systems are outdated and that it runs vulnerable software on more than half of its data centre servers. He said that the platform was breached by foreign intelligence agencies multiple times.In an explosive complaint filed by last month, Zatko alleged that the Indian government forced Twitter to hire an individual who was a “government agent” and likely had access to sensitive user data as part of their job.