Seeking to increase security, social media giant Twitter hires famous hacker “Mudge.”
What We Know:
- After experiencing multiple security breaches, Twitter seeks out one of the world’s best hackers, Peter Zatko but otherwise known as Mudge. He will be taking over the management of essential security functions.
- Zatko says he will examine “information security, site integrity, physical security, platform integrity — which starts to touch on abuse and manipulation of the platform — and engineering.”.
- His career began in the 1990s. He was one of the Cults of the Dead Cow leaders, notorious for releasing Windows hacking tools leading to Microsoft improving security. In 2010 Zatko was a program manager at DARPA, overseeing cybersecurity research. At DARPA, he created the Cyber Analytical Framework, which was used to evaluate DoD investments. In 2013 he went to work for Google.
- Among Twitter’s security challenges, in 2019, two men were accused of spying for Saudi Arabia when working at Twitter a few years earlier. In July, young hackers were able to trick employees into getting access to internal tools. This allowed hackers to change account settings and tweet from multiple celebrity accounts. Among them, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk.
- Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer and employee under Zatko talks about the breach. “The data breach this summer was an important reminder of how far Twitter needs to go in building some of the basic security functions necessary to run a service targeted by adversaries much more skilled than the teenagers arrested for that incident.” Stamos calls Zatko an excellent fit for the company, saying that “They are going to have to find creative solutions to these problems, and if Mudge is famous for anything in security, it is being creative.”
Zatko is excited about the position exclaiming, “They are willing to take some risks,” Zatko said of his new employer. “With the challenges of algorithms and algorithmic bias, they are not standing by and waiting until someone else solves the problem.” With Zatko in charge, users can expect changes in their security.
