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Twitter has called Zatko a disgruntled employee who was fired for poor performance. Twitter's lawyers said on Tuesday that Musk's latest effort to terminate the deal was invalid and wrongful under the agreement. Of Zatkos whistleblowing claims, the social networking site has said: What weve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.

Whereas any other tech industry worker could be ignored, Zatkos background lends some weight to his claims about Twitter. As one of the cybersecurity worlds founding characters, the former Cult of the Dead Cow hacker rubbed shoulders with pioneering ethical hackers.

CDC's hacking specialism was creating software tools that exploited security flaws in Windows, with the aim of forcing Microsoft to fix problems in the world's most popular computer operating system. Mudge's personal contribution was a tool named l0phtcrack, which unscrambled Windows users passwords.

His exploits quickly caught official eyes. In 1998 Mudge was one of seven hackers who said they could shut down the entire internet in 30 minutes, with the group making their extraordinary claim while testifying to the US Congress.

One of Mudge's contemporaries, Chris Wysopal, recalled the impact of those 1990s disclosures in a 2018 interview, saying: "Mudge and I have had meetings with Senator Mark Warner. We know Senator Cory Gardner. These guys are on the Senate Intelligence Committee." Wysopal also said the FBI had vetted the hackers at the time of their exploits to verify them as "good guys".

Mudge later turned to the corporate world where his technical and leadership skills were in high demand. Ever higher-profile jobs in the white collar world of information technology, which by the 2010s had become one of the world's dominant industries, beckoned.

In 2015 Mudge was called upon by the Obama White House to set up a software testing organisation. Two years later he returned to the private sector as head of security for Stripe, the payments processor; his success there caught the eye of Jack Dorsey, who tapped up the veteran hacker in 2020 to run security at Twitter.

By November 2021 Mr Dorsey had resigned, however, saying: I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders. His replacement was Twitter's chief technical officer, Parag Agrawal. Within tech companies there is always a tension between the IT department and the security department, and so it proved at Twitter: Mudge was ousted in January, with Twitter giving the reason as "poor performance".

Analysts say Zatkos whistleblowing claims could have implications in Musks ongoing litigation as he attempts to walk away from the $44bn takeover, which has centred around whether Twitter is honest about how many bots there are on the social network.

Ives, the Wedbush analyst, adds: Importantly, Zatko claims that Twitter does not have an accurate count of the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its platform, which will be front and centre for the Musk team.

Musk and Twitter are due to go to court on October 17 with the spotlight firmly on its former security chiefs explosive claims.

Excerpt from:
How a hacking guru could save Elon Musk $44bn in the battle over Twitter - The Telegraph