Is it safe to use Twitter? Security fears rise after Elon Musk drives off staff.
Elon Musk’s two-week management of Twitter has made the platform more vulnerable to fraud and privacy violations by driving away key members of its longtime security staff, former Twitter employees and cybersecurity experts said Friday.
The fear that Twitter had become a more dangerous place for scams and the theft of personal information added to a growing sense of chaos around the service, which the tech billionaire bought last month for $44 billion.
Twitter’s chief information security officer Lea Kissner and its chief privacy officer Damien Kieran announced their resignations, and they were joined out the door by others who worked on cybersecurity and related teams. Musk a week ago laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce, citing financial constraints.
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Is it safe to use Twitter? Security fears rise after Elon Musk drives off staff
Cybersecurity experts said layoffs and resignations at Twitter had made the platform more vulnerable to attacks from scammers, organized crime and hostile governments.
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Twitter security and privacy executives quit amid company turmoil
Nov. 12, 2022, 2:23 AM EET
By Kevin Collier and David Ingram
Elon Musk’s two-week management of Twitter has made the platform more vulnerable to fraud and privacy violations by driving away key members of its longtime security staff, former Twitter employees and cybersecurity experts said Friday.
The fear that Twitter had become a more dangerous place for scams and the theft of personal information added to a growing sense of chaos around the service, which the tech billionaire bought last month for $44 billion.
Twitter’s chief information security officer Lea Kissner and its chief privacy officer Damien Kieran announced their resignations, and they were joined out the door by others who worked on cybersecurity and related teams. Musk a week ago laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce, citing financial constraints.
“They’re just wounded right now,” said Austin Berglas, a former FBI cybersecurity official in New York who’s now a consultant at security firm BlueVoyant.
“They’ve lost a lot of important players on the field, so I think people are going to try to exploit them while they’re down,” he said.
Berglas said the threats were likely to come from scammers and organized crime, as well as from hostile governments looking to exploit a fluid situation.
San Francisco-based Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the security situation at the company.
Mountains of information
Twitter stores mountains of personal information, including not just email addresses and passwords but data that’s inside its direct-message inboxes — a feature that does not have the end-to-end encryption that helps protect other popular messaging services.
The service for years has relied on its blue-checkmark verification system to increase confidence in the reliability of information on the platform, but impersonations and hoaxes proliferated this week after Musk attempted an overhaul of the system.
At the same time, Twitter is facing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission, which has a longstanding agreement with Twitter to ensure privacy protections.
Ian Brown, a former senior engineering manager at Twitter, said in an online public discussion Friday that the lack of a fully staffed security team could lead to the site not functioning properly or users losing control of their accounts.
“There are security vulnerabilities happening all the time,” Brown said in a Twitter Spaces event.
He echoed a pessimistic view among some Twitter users this week: The service might go down entirely under Musk's ownership. But he said the scams were a more immediate problem.
“Maybe Twitter doesn’t go down before every account has been pwned by a crypto scam,” he said, using a euphemism for being hacked. Brown didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Proofpoint, a company that tracks online fraud, said it had detected a “notable” increase in scammers operating on Twitter including a ruse designed to drain people of their savings.