Twitter Shake-Up Sees Departure Of Top Security Staff

Twitter has said its head of security is no longer at the company and its chief information security officer will depart in the coming weeks.

The changes are the latest under chief executive Parag Agrawal, who succeeded co-founder Jack Dorsey in November.

The company didn’t say whether the departures were voluntary.

In a message to staff last week, Agrawal said the changes followed “an assessment of how the organization was being led and the impact on top priority work” and that the “nature of this situation” limited what he was allowed to share with staff, the New York Times reported.

Reshuffle

In December Agrawal reorganised the company’s leadership team and dismissed chief design officer Dantley Davis and head of engineering Michael Montano.

Peiter Zatko, the head of security, and Rinki Sethi, the chief information security officer, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Both joined the company in late 2020, following a hack that allowed teenagers to tweet from the verified accounts of public figures such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk.

Zatko, known by the handle “Mudge”, is a well-known hacker who has had a long security career since the 1990s working for DARPA, Google and Stripe.

Privacy changes

Sethi was previously a vice president of information security at IBM and has worked in computer security at Intuit and Walmart.

Twitter’s head of privacy engineering Lea Kissner is to take over as interim chief information security officer, according to unnamed sources cited by the New York Times. Kissner has previously held security and privacy roles at Google and Apple.

Agrawal has made other changes in recent weeks, including tightening Twitter’s privacy policy.

Photos uploaded to the platform will now be removed unless the user has obtained the consent of those depicted in them.