Twitter’s former head of security has blown the whistle on what he characterizes as sprawling cybersecurity weaknesses, including vulnerabilities that could lay the social media platform open to cyberattacks that could have major national-security implications. That’s the allegation from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who sent a 200+-page disclosure to Congress detailing issues that he claims could…

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a $150 million fine against Twitter for misrepresenting its security and privacy practices. The FTC, in cooperation with the Department of Justice (DoJ), says that Twitter has been using the email addresses and phone numbers it collects from users to enable two-factor authentication to serve targeted advertising. In…

Some major tech companies have unwittingly opened harassment and exploitation opportunities to the women and children who they have pledged to protect. This happened because they provided information in response to emergency data requests from legitimate law enforcement accounts that hackers had compromised. This finding came from four federal law enforcement agencies and a couple…

The agency, Roskomnadzor, said Friday it decided to cut access to Facebook over its alleged “discrimination” of the Russian media and state information resources. It said the restrictions introduced by Facebook owner Meta on the RT and other state-controlled media violate the Russian law. A week ago, the watchdog announced “partial restrictions” on access to…

Facebook removed over 800 accounts, pages and groups from the social media platform for engaging in what the company calls coordinated inauthentic behavior. Other accounts were taken down for brigading and mass reporting. The largest number of removed Facebook accounts, pages, and groups (548 in total, alongside 86 Instagram accounts) were associated with a network…

“We’re taking this step because of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers and our reliance on having a linked phone number for two-factor authentication (we’re working on improving this),” Twitter said. It added, “We’ll reactivate this in markets that depend on SMS for reliable communication soon while we work on our longer-term…

New Open Source Tools Help Find Large Twitter Botnets

Duo Security has created open source tools and disclosed techniques that can be useful in identifying automated Twitter accounts, which are often used for malicious purposes. The trusted access solutions provider, which Cisco recently agreed to acquire for $2.35 billion, has collected and studied 88 million Twitter accounts and over half-a-billion tweets. Based on this…