• Wed. Nov 6th, 2024

    Twitter cyber security chief resigns, heightens concerns about platform safety

    Three of Twitter Inc’s top privacy and security officials said they’re leaving, heightening concerns about the company’s ability to keep its platform secure and comply with regulatory rules.

    Lea Kissner, Twitter’s former chief information security officer, announced that they were leaving Thursday. Damien Kieran, the chief privacy officer, and Marianne Fogarty, chief compliance officer, also resigned from the company on Wednesday night, according to an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg News.

    “I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter,” Kissner, who uses the pronoun they, wrote Thursday in a tweet. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we’ve done.”

    Kieran nor Kissner didn’t respond to requests for comment. Twitter also didn’t respond. Fogarty couldn’t immediately be reached; her LinkedIn account had disabled all communications.

    The departures, which were previously reported by the Verge, came about a week after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, announced sweeping firings at the company and hours after Twitter began providing a verification badge to users who paid the company a monthly $8 fee.

    Kissner, who previously held roles at Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc.s Google, took over the job of CISO in January 2022, according to their LinkedIn. Their elevation to the top information security job came after Peiter Zatko, also known as Mudge, left the role after a little more than one year of working at the company.

    Twitter is currently bound by a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission that regulates how the company handles user data. In July, Zatko filed an 84-page whistleblower complaint with multiple U.S. government agencies, alleging that the company had violated the terms of its agreement with the FTC. Zatko also said the security lapses at Twitter were so grave that they threatened national security.

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