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Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter, is a wild card in Elon Musk’s legal ploy to void the $44 billion purchase agreement for the social network.
Musk’s quest to persuade a judge that he was duped when he made an unsolicited offer to Twitter is aided by Zatko’s whistleblower complaint of “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in Twitter’s defences against hackers and “meagre efforts to combat spam.”
Twitter has dismissed 51-year-old Zatko’s complaint as without merit and vowed to demonstrate its innocence in an October trial in a Delaware court.
Zatko’s charges might be rendered irrelevant by the court if it emphasises the fact that the richest man in the world neglected to conduct the fact-finding procedures generally involved in high-value transactions.
On Tuesday, he will give testimony before a US Senate committee investigating whether Twitter’s security procedures were dangerously insufficient.
When Zatko first appeared before Congress 24 years ago, he was a long-haired hacker seeking to raise awareness of the dangers of inadequately secured governmental computer networks.
This time, he will be required to present specifics regarding his claims that Twitter concealed security problems and was fighting accounts controlled by spammers or software rather than actual users.
One of the justifications given by Musk for abandoning the buyout agreement he reached in April included the sheer volume of phoney Twitter accounts.
The Zatko whistleblower claims are currently the main X factor, according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a note to investors. Once both sides appear in court, Ives said, “it’s a high risk/high reward scenario for both parties.”
“We continue to see the Zatko issue as a Twitter equivalent of the opening of a Pandora’s Box.”
If Twitter wins the case at trial, the court may order the Tesla CEO to pay the business billions of dollars or even finalise the acquisition.
In a special vote scheduled for Tuesday, Twitter shareholders will likely approve the takeover agreement.
A lot of issues
According to Aaron Turner, chief technology officer of the cybersecurity company Vectra, who claims to have known Zatko since the 1980s, “If Mudge thinks Twitter has cybersecurity problems, Twitter has enormous problems.”
Zatko, a software developer and the son of scientists, was raised in Pennsylvania and Alabama in the United States.
He affiliated himself with the L0pht hacker group in 1996. In a testimony before Congress two years later, he and other group members were involved.
In a 2019 tweet commemorating the testimony’s anniversary, Zatko noted that it was the first time the American government had used the term “hackers” in a favourable context.
Zatko has worked for Google, Stripe, and the Pentagon’s DARPA research agency, among other companies.
In July 2020, following a spectacular theft of the accounts of notable public personalities like Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Kim Kardashian, Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey hired Zatko.
Early last year, US President Joe Biden’s staff extended an offer to Zatko to serve as White House security director, but he turned it down because he thought he still had work to do at Twitter, according to his attorneys.
Home of Cards?
In January, Twitter fired Zatko due to his “ineffective leadership and poor performance.”
Lawyers representing Zatko denied Twitter’s assertion, arguing that instead he was fired following a confrontation with senior officials who refused to take seriously his worries about platform security.
Because of his worries about the public, Twitter users, and the company’s stockholders, Mr. Zatko put his career in jeopardy, according to his counsel.
According to Andrew Hay, director of operations at the cybersecurity consulting company Lares, many in the industry who are familiar with Mudge are aware that his objectives have historically been honourable, apolitical, and designed to help the entire world.
Analysts argue that Zatko’s whistleblower complaint—filed just days after Twitter offered him a multimillion-dollar severance package—does not necessarily prove that the firm misrepresented the number of users.
