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Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a famed hacker who served as Twitter's
head of security until he was fired last year, will appear
Tuesday before the committee.
Senate Judiciary chair Dick Durbin and Republican Chuck Grassley
on Tuesday asked Agrawal to answer questions by Sept. 26
including on Zatko's allegations Twitter "turned a blind eye to
foreign intelligence infiltration, does not adequately protect
user data and has provided misleading or inaccurate information
about its security practices to government agencies."
The senators said they had invited Agrawal to testify on
Tuesday, but he had declined.
Twitter declined comment.
Durbin and Grassley outlined some concerns raised by Zatko,
including potentially more than half of Twitter full-time
employees having privileged access to company production
systems. With that capability, several thousand employees can
access sensitive user data, according to Zatko.
"... at the same time, Twitter reportedly lacks sufficient
capacity to reliably know who has accessed specific systems and
data and what they did with it," the senators wrote in a letter
to Agrawal.
"With tens of millions of users in the U.S. and hundreds of
millions of users worldwide, your company collects and is
responsible for vast troves of sensitive data," they wrote. "If
accurate, Mr. Zatko's allegations demonstrate an unacceptable
disregard for data security that threatens national security and
the privacy of Twitter's users."
Zatko has claimed Twitter had misled regulators about its
compliance with a 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade
Commission over improper handling of user data.
Durbin, while speaking to reporters on Monday, said Zatko's
claims were "a matter of grave personal and privacy concern."
Twitter has said the former executive was fired for "ineffective
leadership and poor performance," and that his allegations
appeared designed to capture attention and inflict harm on
Twitter.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Christopher Cushing
and Bradley Perrett)
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