Twitter has appointed Peiter Zatko, widely known by his hacker handle Mudge, as head of security. Zatko will report to CEO Jack Dorsey. Zatko is considered one of the world’s best-regarded hackers to tackle everything from engineering missteps to misinformation.
According to Reuters, Zatko said he will examine “information security, site integrity, physical security, platform integrity — which starts to touch on abuse and manipulation of the platform — and engineering.”
Prior to this role, Zatko served at electronic payments unicorn Stripe. Prior to that, he worked on special projects at Google and oversaw handing out grants for projects on cybersecurity at the Pentagon’s famed Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA).
“I don’t know if anyone can fix Twitter’s security, but he’d be at the top of my list,” said Dan Kaufman, who supervised Zatko at DARPA and now leads the advanced products group at Google.
Zatko said he was committed to improving public conversations on Twitter. He praised a recent move to increase “friction” by prompting users to comment instead of simply retweeting; a next step could be to force people to understand a long conversation before participating in it, he said.
“They are willing to take some risks,” Zatko said of his new employer. “With the challenges of algorithms and algorithmic bias, they are not standing by and waiting until someone else solves the problem.”
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