A former security chief over at twitter has decided to blow the whistle about
the ongoing security concerns over at the social media platform and
does not look good, although some of what he has revealed is not that surprising.
Now, here's what we know so far.
Peter Mudge Zlatko and much is his nickname I guess has said that
twitter has failed to properly secure its service from hackers.
It's also neglected to count the number of fake accounts on the app
of which we all know there are many and
even permitted foreign governments to access sensitive user information.
Now, he is a renowned hacker who had been helping corporations and
the government with cyber security measures for decades, Twitter of course,
possesses all sorts of highly sensitive user information.
So this is a big concern and back in 2011,
it's important to remember that Twitter faced two high profile hacks and
the company was subsequently sued by the FTC.
And in a settlement, twitter did agree to implement monitor and
adjust security safeguards to protect users.
But Zico's argument here is that twitter not only failed to implement
those safeguards, but they also lied about their negligence.
So here's an example, one example of many, the 2011 order required
twitter to implement a software development lifecycle program,
a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs.
The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and
the FTC that there For making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter
systems, but Zydeco alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to
only 1/10 of the company's projects and even then treated as optional and
current and former employees also agreed by the way with the complaint's assertion
that the past reports to various privacy regulators were misleading at best.
For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users
who asked but the material had spread so widely inside twitter's networks.
It was impossible to know for sure.
And let me just also note that the FTC getting involved in investigating
a social media giant, usually indicates that they're they're
worried about investors being defrauded, right?
So we'll get back to that in just a moment.
But I do think it's important that this whistleblower blew the whistle on some of
the security concerns over at Twitter, Cenk?
>> Yeah, so look this could go either way but
I'm gonna tell you which one I think it actually cuts now.
Why do I say either way Sometimes people are disgruntled former employees.
He was fired in january and
he was originally hired by Jack Dorsey who's not the ceo eventually fired him.
Jack Dorsey left and the new guy came in and fired him and and
Dorsey had hired him because he was a famous hacker.
The hackers usually work by themselves.
You put them inside a large organization and
they might not like the process through which they those organizations work.
Those are real issues that can come up and by the way you must has got to be thrilled
today with this because it's certainly going to help his case against twitter.
So it did make me go right.
But when you look at the details of it, you see that the,
that the weight of the evidence is on the other side that he is telling the truth.
First of all, you've got current and
former employees of twitter backing up his story on several important grounds.
Second of all, when he said this is a really important point guys,
he said the executives had an incentive to increase the number of followers.
But no incentive to make sure that there wasn't that much spam and
their bonuses were up to $10 million.
That's a lot of incentive to not regulate the spam and
have it appear to be a lot of followers.
But that gets to the underlying problem that Twitter has always had.
If you don't verify the users and have them use their real identity,
you're by definition going to have tons and tons of spams and bots,
etcetera and then you're gonna have an incentive for
the rest of your life to keep those numbers high because that's what you
get rewarded on either by internal board metrics or by the stock market if
they were ever honest about the amount of spam there is on twitter,
the stock price would crater and and that's that's because they allow
people to use dummy accounts and that we can all see with our own eyes.
So it is very likely that this whistleblower is telling the truth.
>> Right, and again, if you're incentivized to incentivized with
a potentially $10 million dollar bonus by increasing the number of daily users,
then of course that incentivizes you to avoid doing anything about
the spam accounts and the body counts that we all see on a daily basis.
So I just want to go to the last graphic here,
which is Elon musk reacting to the whistleblower report with this fun.
Give me a whistle, you know, image and
it does seem to verify the concerns that he has.
Now, that doesn't mean it's an open and shut case for Elon musk and
the whole purchasing twitter fiasco.
But nonetheless, I mean, I think we've all seen that twitter has that problem and
is unwilling to do a damn thing about it.
>> Yeah, and by the way to double down on what NSA.
It doesn't mean that he's going to win this case because he should have put into
the contract.
Hey, if you are lying about the spam numbers, then the deal is off.
But he did not put that clause in the contract.
He rushed it for no reason.
It was incredibly negligent.
The deal that he made with twitter, you know,
we'll see what a jury thinks about that.
But for the moment being guys if you don't already know it, if you're seeing
a comment on twitter, you have no idea if it's real or not real, if it's an actual
person because once they allow this kind of gaming of the system, you'd be nuts.
Not the game, almost all the journalists are on twitter, they can influence
the conventional thinking of not just the journalists, but the public as well.
So if you're a foreign country, your corporation, your donor, whatever it might
be, you almost certainly politicians, you almost have to go on twitter and
set up fake accounts and try to influence people's way of thinking.
So that place is, in some ways it's great because it said, if they verify people's
identities, I think it would be a really healthy marketplace of ideas.
But since they allow spammers and bots and they obviously have this ridiculous
system where they encourage it by having the inflated follower accounts, you're
always gonna never be sure if it's truth or lies that you're seeing on Twitter