Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On August 28, it was reported this week that Peiter Zatko, the former head of security for social media platform Twitter, reported that Twitter had extremely serious problems with user privacy, web security and platform content censorship. In recent days, Twitter has had to deal with falling share prices and a new round of scrutiny by members of Congress, adding to the uncertainty over the company's legal battle with billionaire Elon Musk.

Zatko has previously reported that Twitter has serious security and privacy vulnerabilities that could put the security of users, investors and other institutions at risk. He also claimed that Twitter executives misled regulators and the company's board of directors in an attempt to cover up security flaws.

Twitter criticized Zatko's report and explained the allegations. The company said that Zatko disclosed the information is a "false description" of the company, "a lot of the content is inconsistent and inaccurate." He was fired by Twitter in January, which a company spokesman said was mainly due to Zatko's "poor leadership and poor performance."

But members of Congress, regulators, cyber security industry experts and Musk's lawyers reacted strongly to Zatko's disclosure, which could have a significant and lasting impact on the company. The report comes as Twitter is grappling with uncertainty among employees, shareholders and advertisers as the company has yet to agree on a deal with Mr Musk.

The report, which is about 200 pages long, and supporting materials were sent to a number of agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the US Department of Justice (DOJ), last month.

Twitter shares fell 7% on Tuesday after the tip-off was announced. Twitter's share price has fallen sharply on the back of Mr Musk's desire to pull out of the deal, and has halved since the beginning of last year.

Lawmakers and regulators began asking questions on Wednesday, the day after the report was made public, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee announced that it would hold a hearing to discuss with Zatko allegations of vulnerabilities in Twitter's security mechanism and misleading statements made by executives.

The hearing is scheduled for September 13, the same day Twitter shareholders will vote on whether to approve Musk's $44 billion acquisition of the company.

"Zatko's allegations of widespread security vulnerabilities on Twitter have raised serious concerns," said Dick Durbin and Chuck Grassley, chairmen of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. "if these claims are accurate, they may pose huge risks to the data privacy and security of Twitter users."

Other members of the US Congress also expressed their views on the matter.

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee received a copy of the complaint document. Committee spokeswoman Rachel Rachel Cohen said the intelligence committee took the matter seriously and was holding a meeting to discuss the allegations. Richard Blumenthal, chairman of the US Senate consumer protection subcommittee, wrote to FTC on Tuesday calling for an investigation into the allegations. He stressed that if the investigation found that some Twitter executives were responsible for security vulnerabilities, they would be fined and personally held accountable. On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden renewed his call for Twitter to use secure end-to-end encryption to protect users' information from being peeped or stolen. On Thursday, members of the House Homeland Security Committee wrote to Twitter CEO Palag Agrawal (Parag Agrawal) asking him to explain Zatko's allegations. The Irish data Protection Commission, Twitter's main European regulator, also said it was pulling more information from the company in light of the allegations.

Impact on the Twitter v. Musk acquisition the content reported by Zatko could have a significant impact on the Twitter v. Musk acquisition. But Musk remained unusually silent on the matter in the days after the news broke.

Musk responded on Twitter on Tuesday with pictures of crickets from the movie Puppet Adventures, with the caption "whistling." He also quoted an article on the Twitter platform discussing how Twitter counts robot accounts, an issue that has been at the heart of Musk's withdrawal from the Twitter deal. Twitter insisted on publishing the number of robot accounts and accused Musk of backing out and using statistical robot accounts as an excuse to evade trading.

Although Musk said nothing about Zatko himself, his lawyer was clearly interested in the content of the report. Alex Spiro, Mr Musk's lawyer, said Mr Musk's legal team had asked the court to subpoena Zatko before the news was disclosed.

Spiro mentioned Zatko several times at a court hearing on Wednesday. Spiro said at the hearing that the Musk team did not believe Twitter's estimates of key indicators such as spam accounts and the number of profitable daily active users. He said the Musk team was asking the company for more information to verify the results.

"they have an economic motive to mislead investors," Spiro said. "there is now a public report that Twitter provides false information."

Zatko did say in the filing that Twitter did not accurately count the number of spam and robot fake accounts on the platform, and that the company had little incentive to fully count fake accounts, which may make Musk's claim more credible. Mr Musk's lawyers may also try to use other reports unrelated to the robot account, such as Twitter misrepresentations about privacy and security measures, to support that Mr Musk should have abandoned the deal.

Zatko said that his reporting of Twitter problems had nothing to do with the acquisition, that he did not have any personal relationship with Musk, and that he began documenting his concerns before Musk intersected with Twitter.

Twitter says it does allow similar robots on the platform, such as pushing major news events, but explicitly forbids robots that send spam or manipulate the platform. Twitter says it regularly reviews, suspends and cleans up robot accounts, usually deleting more than 1 million spam accounts a day. But Twitter declined to answer questions about how many robot accounts exist on the platform or how many new robot accounts are added every day.

Reassure employees Twitter executives have been publicly refuting the reports and trying to appease employee reactions within the company. In an internal memo to employees on Tuesday, Mr Agrawal said he would question the contents of the reports, calling the allegations "frustrating and confusing to read".

He also mentioned the situation at a company-wide meeting on Wednesday. Agrawal refuted Zatko's claim at the beginning of the meeting, saying that he fabricated a "wrong description" of the company out of thin air and was "currently challenging our integrity".

At a meeting on Wednesday, Sean Sean Edgett, general counsel of Twitter, said that when the company learned of the Zatko report, it took the initiative to contact US regulators and "institutions around the world".

Twitter confirmed on Thursday that it will join forces with various teams to prevent bad content and spam robots on the platform and improve the transparency of improving the health of the platform. A company spokesman did not directly respond to questions about whether the business restructuring was related to the report.

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