Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko says company leadership “ignored its engineers” on difficulty protecting user data.
ZATKO: “Twitter leadership that ignored its engineers because key parts of leadership lacked the competency to understand the scope of the problem. But more importantly, their executive incentives led them to prioritize profits over security. Upton Sinclair, famously said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” this mentality is exactly what I saw at the executive level at Twitter. So what are the problems I discovered? Two basic issues. First, they don't know what data they have, where it lives, or where it came from and so unsurprisingly, they can't protect it. And this leads to the second problem, which is the employees then have to have too much access to too much data and to too many systems. You can think of it this way which is, it doesn't matter who has keys if you don't have any locks on the doors. And this kind of vulnerability is not in the abstract, it's not far-fetched to say that employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room.”
