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Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

cnn.com

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Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#271

Post by ctrlmeta »

tschellenbach wrote: post #240

Zatko reported directly to the CEO, as a senior leader you need to take responsibility for your own work. Does anyone believe that in an organization as large as Twitter he didn't have enough resources to solve this? I imagine his budget ran in the tens of millions.

I can very much believe it. A CEO can, if they play their cards right, block the CTO from accomplishing what the CTO set out to do. Budget is not the problem. Approvals and alignment with board members are the problems. And if the CTO still decides to push forward, the CEO can still fire the CTO for underperformance which is exactly what you see in this story.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#272

Post by PuppyTailWags »

upupandup wrote: post #250
the_lonely_road wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI Kpop is "very" popular in some segments of American culture that you just might not cross over with. I experience it frequently in the "Team Fight Tactics" ecosystem which is an E-Sport run by Riot Games (of League of Legends fame) that for some reason contains a very large Asian American population (in relation to their % of the population) and all of them frequently stream Kpop to large audiences. The largest s…

what I find peculiar about the kpop crowd is how they seemingly appear out of nowhere and on-demand on in political topics to drown out/cancel people who don't like them or share their values. In Korea a blogger was able to see how BTS fans or "bots" were able to game the music ranking. What's interesting to me is how they seemingly correlate with wumaos as well. I don't have solid evidence but it appears that much o…

I think youngsters are very nuanced, actually, but their political tactics are adapted to a full acknowledgement of an algorithm as a player in the political landscape game. Take the teenager who took being dunked on by a republican politician for being fat and used it to make herself viral in raising like 700k for abortion. That's not a kid who is caught up in a craze-- that's a kid who is fully aware of how social media functions and is using it to politically outmaneuver opponents. I think they look bizarre, but that's because the landscape they have to "win" in is bizarre. The incentives are twisted and the genz know it.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#273

Post by winternett »

stuckinhell wrote: post #222

The bots problem is absolutely nightmare issue for a social network. I can't imagine what I'd do if I discovered my network was fake. The whole point of my network is building professional connections and gaining skills for work. Also seeing various weird topics on twitter like kpop or other random things always made me wonder how much artificial bot boosting was done for those who had money to pay the bot net.

The KPOP spam is regularly littered with bot accounts posting the same comments regularly.

If you have a platform as prominent as Twitter, making it onto the trending timeline can be very profitable for musicians. The same major industry artists regularly trend on Twitter because they command most of the profit, and then often use a percentage of that for paid and bot promotion. It's just my opinion, but Twitter facilitates and permits that bad behavior regularly because they profit off of the activity too.

There is not much more frustrating than being a creator or artist and competing with major industry forces that have unlimited funding and internal contacts within Twitter that ensure that trending is on rails daily. It's not only bots, it's the sponsored and sanctioned control of what trends that is a hallmark of the platform.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#274

Post by raxxorraxor »

SilverBirch wrote: post #127

I think it's a pretty open secret that Twitter is a fairly broken company. It's no surprise that their security practices are bad, because all their practices are bad. It's also very difficult to view this in isolation when you have the timeline of (1): Fired in January, nothing happens. (2) Musk makes offer for twitter then reneges. (3) Months before the lawsuit gets decided re-emerges with accusations. What happene…

To be honest, Twitter didn't manage expectations. If I register on such a platform, I expect my mail/pwd combination to stay reasonably safe. Reasonably, because there is never a guarantee.

The rest of these expectations are entirely on the users. If people take security as seriously as they proclaim, they should not have registered. To now demand meticulous access controls sounds a bit neglectful to me...

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#275

Post by itsoktocry »

happyopossum wrote: post #247
SilverBirch wrote: post #127

I think it's a pretty open secret that Twitter is a fairly broken company. It's no surprise that their security practices are bad, because all their practices are bad. It's also very difficult to view this in isolation when you have the timeline of (1): Fired in January, nothing happens. (2) Musk makes offer for twitter then reneges. (3) Months before the lawsuit gets decided re-emerges with accusations. What happene…

You’re ascribing the worst possible motives to someone based on your hatred of Elon Musk. Someone who has no known relationship with Musk, who has claimed publicly they started this process before Musk was involved with twitter, and who is a long standing and well regarded figure in the infosec world. I think you’re gonna need more than Musk Derangement Syndrome fueled conspiracy theories to make your accusations sti…

>You’re ascribing the worst possible motives to someone based on your hatred of Elon Musk.

I'm not going to claim some big conspiracy here, but I do find this beyond coincidence.

I don't think that this is coming out now because Mudge is acting on behalf of Elon. I think Elon's Twitter bid (and ensuing drama and upcoming lawsuit) and this revelation are part of the same agenda. For better or worse, it looks like influential powers that be are going to take down/over Twitter.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#276

Post by sroussey »

mrex wrote: post #172
jdhn wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What might the SEC and shareholders do in response? If shareholders believe this, they can do a variety of things such as sell the stock (smaller holders), or demand answers from leadership that go beyond "Yeah, we're secure" (bigger holders such as Saudi Arabia).

Some options that shareholders would have in the situation where investors were knowingly deceived by false disclosures of a publicly traded company are missing from this response.

Their disclosures are similar to this: we check for bots, use a process, the process could be wrong.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#277

Post by sroussey »

KerrAvon wrote: post #254
mrex wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>waiving due diligence rights Pop legal quiz - does "waving due diligence rights" during an acquisition remove the other party's liability for fraud they've committed against the prospective buyer?

Pop legal quiz - define « fraud ». Musk literally tweeted about the « bot problem » on Twitter before the acquisition.

Not only that, it seemed like a reason he wanted to buy Twitter.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#278

Post by minhazm »

bequanna wrote: post #136
saalweachter wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think about the implications with respect to Twitter DMs that show up in criminal investigations. For instance, consider the Twitter DMs exchanged by Donald Trump, Jr and WikiLeaks. In that particular case, the communication was acknowledged by the party in question, but imagine the two possibilities thousands of employees being able to act on the part of users opens up: 1. Twitter employees could fabricate a cri…

This seems like a huge win for the defense in a case using DMs or Tweets as evidence. It would be quite easy to argue that a highly-politicized org like Twitter _might_ alter tweets or DMs to implicate someone in the opposing party. That’s reasonable doubt that at least some jurors would buy.

Usually these sorts of systems have very detailed logs and those logs are kept for a long time for things like lawsuits. In the hypothetical scenario you're describing the other party would subpoena Twitter and they would corroborate whether or not someone logged as that user or not.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#279

Post by winternett »

upupandup wrote: post #250
the_lonely_road wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI Kpop is "very" popular in some segments of American culture that you just might not cross over with. I experience it frequently in the "Team Fight Tactics" ecosystem which is an E-Sport run by Riot Games (of League of Legends fame) that for some reason contains a very large Asian American population (in relation to their % of the population) and all of them frequently stream Kpop to large audiences. The largest s…

what I find peculiar about the kpop crowd is how they seemingly appear out of nowhere and on-demand on in political topics to drown out/cancel people who don't like them or share their values. In Korea a blogger was able to see how BTS fans or "bots" were able to game the music ranking. What's interesting to me is how they seemingly correlate with wumaos as well. I don't have solid evidence but it appears that much o…

People don't do that unless they are paid somehow. It's organized activity if you search properly under each time it trends... One or a few accounts will post a keyword or phrase, and then all the subsequent accounts will constantly post with the words spelled exactly the same. Twitter suppresses coordinated activity from many other accounts, and it's against their rules, but somehow they allow it to go on regularly for certain topics like KPOP and BTS, and it results in a lot of streams and album sales only for whoever is trending.

This is also likely why Twitter makes it very hard to scroll to tweets at the beginning of when a trend started, and why timestamps are not really shown for the beginning of a trend to the public.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#280

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

tyjen wrote: post #75

"The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to." I imagine this hurts Twitter's defense against Musk from pulling out of the takeover deal, or, is this whistleblower's account inadmissible?

I read some good commentary on this that I agree with.

From a purely legal perspective, this really shouldn't matter much. As has been pointed out many times, Musk explicitly waived due diligence when he signed the contract. Also, it's still laughable to think that Musk's real reason for wanting to get out of the deal is the bot problem (instead of the obvious reason of the market tanking), when Musk himself made the argument that a big benefit of him buying Twitter is that he would be able to clean up the bot problem in the first place.

From the court-of-public-opinion, though, I think it does give Musk more leverage for a negotiated settlement to get out of the deal, which is really what he wants. I don't think Musk really thinks he can win in Delaware, but the longer he drags things out and the more pain he causes Twitter the more incentive they have to negotiate cancelling the deal.

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