[ad_1]
Twitter hired a new security chief four months after suffering one of the worst breaches in its 14-year history.
As reported by Reuters on Monday, Peiter Zatko, a prominent white-hat hacker named “Mudge,” said he will take care of security, site integrity and engineering on behalf of the social media giant.
“Looks like the cat has come out of the sack,” Zatko said a tweet on Monday. “I am very excited to be joining the Twitter executive team! I truly believe in the mission of (fairly) serving the public conversation.”
Zatko will report directly to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and take over security functions on the social media site after a 45-60 day review, Reuters reported.
The infamous hacker made a name for himself in the 1990s when he took on a secret job for a government contractor while also leading a hacker group known as the Dead Cow Cult with the goal of exposing security flaws in Microsoft Windows.
The new hire is part of Twitter’s attempts to increase its security after a group of teenagers compromised 30 high-profile Twitter users. In the breaches, the hijacked accounts sent messages to their millions of followers falsely promising to double the money of users who sent bitcoins, what is known as a crypto scam.
In a separate attack in September, hackers hijacked a Twitter account of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, spreading messages asking for cryptocurrency donations. Twitter is now looking to strengthen its defense against future attacks and protect itself from the threat of regulatory action.
Zatko was recently tasked with maintaining security on the San Francisco-based Stripe electronic payments platform, and he also brings extensive experience from his time at Google and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA).
[ad_2]Source link
