US President Joe Biden’s team offered Zatko a position as White House security director early last year but he declined the job, believing he had work left to do at Twitter, his attorneys said. Twitter founder and former chief Jack Dorsey recruited Zatko in July 2020 after a spectacular hack of the accounts of celebrities and political figures including Barack Obama, Musk and Kim Kardashian. Zatko has done stints at Google and online payment services company Stripe, and also at Pentagon research arm DARPA. “It was the first time the US government publicly referenced ‘hackers’ in a positive context,” Zatko said in a 2019 tweet marking an anniversary of the testimony. He and other members of the group testified before Congress two years later. In 1996, he joined a hacker collective called L0pht. “If Mudge says Twitter has cybersecurity problems, Twitter has big problems,” said Vectra cybersecurity firm chief technology officer Aaron Turner, who says he has known Zatko since the 1980s.Ī son of scientists, Zatko grew up in the US states of Alabama and Pennsylvania, his passions including music and software. Twitter shareholders are expected to endorse the buyout deal in a special vote Tuesday. If Twitter prevails at trial, the judge could order the Tesla chief to pay billions of dollars to the company, or even complete the purchase. “We continue to view the Zatko situation as a Pandora’s Box scenario for Twitter.” “Once both parties step into court its a high risk/high reward scenario for both parties with the major X variable now being the Zatko whistleblower claims,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors. Musk has listed the number of inauthentic accounts on Twitter as among reasons to justify walking away from the buyout deal he made in April. This time, he will be called on to provide details about his accusations that Twitter hid flaws in its security as well as its fight against accounts run by spammers or software instead of genuine users. Zatko first testified before Congress 24 years ago, when he was a long-haired hacker determined to warn about the perils of poorly protected government computer systems. He is to testify on Tuesday before a US Senate committee looking into whether security practices at Twitter were dangerously lax. If the court focuses on the fact that the world’s richest man declined to do fact gathering typically associated with big-money mergers, Zatko’s allegations could wind up being moot. Twitter has dismissed 51-year-old Zatko’s complaint as being without merit, and vowed to show it did nothing wrong at an October trial in a Delaware court. Zatko’s whistleblower complaint of “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in Twitter defences against hackers and “meager efforts to fight spam” plays into Musk’s quest to convince a judge that he was duped when he foisted his unsolicited offer on the company. SAN FRANCISCO: Respected in cybersecurity circles, former Twitter security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko is a wild card in Elon Musk’s legal gambit to break a US$44bil (RM198.30bil) deal to buy the social network.
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