Twitter, a social network with hundreds of millions of users, “was over a decade behind industry security standards,” he later testified. His concerns, raised privately at first and later in a whistleblower disclosure that became public, would upend one of the world’s most influential social networks and raise new questions about its pending acquisition by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. A big part of the issue, Zatko told a Senate panel, was that software and e-commerce companies “want to ignore problems as long as possible. When he was hired to join Twitter, Zatko framed the move in terms of the public good. “This wasn’t my first choice,” he previously told CNN.

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