WASHINGTON—The U.S. Senate Judiciary committee will hold a hearing on Sept. 13 with Twitter Inc.’s former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko to discuss allegations from his whistleblower complaint that the social media company misled regulators.
Zatko, who accused Twitter of falsely claiming it had a solid security plan and making misleading statements about its defenses against hackers and spam accounts, has already discussed his complaint with staffs of the chair and ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to a spokesperson for Zatko.
In an 84-page complaint, Zatko, a famed hacker widely known as “Mudge,” made numerous claims and alleged Twitter prioritized user growth over reducing spam, with executives eligible to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam, according to documents relayed by congressional investigators….