Who is Mudge? Meet Peiter Zatko, the world's 'best hacker' and Twitter's new head of security
Peiter C Zatko, better known by as Mudge, a famed open-source programmer and hacker, was appointed as the new head of security for Twitter on November 16. The social media giant has in the past been plagued with plenty of serious security breaches as several high-profile accounts were hacked apart from dealing with misinformation and threat of regulation.
Zatko, known as (one of) the world’s ‘best hacker’ will directly work with the CEO Jack Dorsey to manage the key security functions of Twitter after a 45-60 day review period. Zatko will also recommend all necessary changes to avoid the breach of security which frequented the microblogging site this year with a number of high profile accounts hacked.
Zatko said his initial work for Twitter will be to examine "information security, site integrity, physical security, platform integrity - which starts to touch on abuse and manipulation of the platform - and engineering," Daily Mail reported.
Zatko, 49, was recently involved with the electronic payments unicorn Stripe to oversee security concerns. He has previously worked with Google and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
The original author of password cracking software L0phtCrack, Zatko joined the esteemed hacker think tank L0pht as ‘Mudge’. L0pht, the hacker collective was famous as the first-ever viable hackerspace who introduced responsible disclosure and testified in front of Congress in 1998 on the topic of ‘Weak Computer Security in Government’. With L0pht, he worked on disclosure and education on information and security vulnerabilities and went on to identify flaws in the cryptanalysis of commercial systems and exploitation of embedded systems.
Mudge also worked to weed out various ways of infiltrating a software such as code injection and side-channel attack, making the security of a software, airtight. Zatko was also a part of the long-lived legendary computer and culture hacking cooperative the Cult of the Dead Cow. This was the time when he actually began his career in the 1990s. As one of the leaders of Cult of the Dead Cow, better known as cDc or cDc Communications, he constantly worked on releasing Windows hacking tools to urge Microsoft into bettering their security systems.
To everyone’s surprise, Mudge’s Bachelor’s was on music as he passed from the Berklee College of Music at the top of his class and known to be an adept guitar player.
With Twitter, Zatko plans to bring a few unconventional changes as he said that he appreciates Twitter’s way of going out of the traditional methods to ensure better security. Recently, Twitter introduced a feature where users have to go through one extra step for retweeting a post rather than simply pressing the retweet button. Zatko plans to bring more features which would force the users to understand a conversation on a long thread before participating in it. "They are willing to take some risks," Zatko said referring to Twitter. "With the challenges of algorithms and algorithmic bias, they are not standing by and waiting until someone else solves the problem."
Earlier this year, several verified Twitter accounts were hacked including that of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk where the scam tweets asked people to send bitcoins and the scammers reportedly received more than $116,000 worth of cryptocurrency.