American businessman Elon Musk subpoenaed Twitterʼs former head of security, Peter Zatko, to testify against the company. Zatko, who was fired in early 2022, previously accused the company of withholding bot data and lax security.
Reuters writes about it.
Zatko is scheduled to testify in a U.S. court on September 9. Musk asks that he share materials about spam accounts and Twitterʼs attempts to hide security flaws, which may indicate illegal activity of the company.
Zatko has yet to respond to the subpoena, but if he testifies, Musk will have plenty of grounds for further lawsuits.
- Due to the failure to provide information about the number of bots on the platform, Musk had problems with the purchase of Twitter. According to him, Twitter did not respond to inquiries about fake accounts on the social network. After that, the company sued to terminate the deal, and Musk countersued. The review will begin on October 17, 2022 in an accelerated mode — five days.
- On August 23, Twitterʼs former head of security Peter Zatko, who was fired in early 2022, accused the company of hiding the truth about the amount of spam and bots on the social network. He also reported on security problems and discord in the team.
- Zatko was a well-known hacker who was hired by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 — after a major breach of Twitter ʼs systems.
- He was fired by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, with whom Zatko had a strained relationship. Agrawal called the former security chiefʼs statements "lies."
- Against the background of court proceedings and Zatkoʼs statements, Twitter began to lose employees.