Republican Senator Urges Elon Musk to Conduct Threat Assessment on Twitter to Protect User Data

Following up on concerns expressed by a whistleblower, top Senate Republican Chuck Grassley requested Elon Musk, who recently just acquired Twitter, to carry out a threat assessment at the social media business to better protect U.S. user data, according to a report by Reuters.

Hacker Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a whistleblower who led security at Twitter until his removal in January, revealed in testimony in September that several staff members were worried that the Chinese government would be able to access user data.

Threat Assessment

The top Republican on the US Judiciary Committee, Grassley, ordered Twitter to conduct a threat assessment of its present security posture and systems in order to better safeguard user data and privacy in a letter to Musk dated Tuesday and made public on Wednesday.

He further requested that the committee staff be informed of the results.

Twitter collects vast amounts of data on American citizens. Americans have a vested interest in ensuring that their private data is secure, and that the companies which they have entrusted with their private data have not been infiltrated by foreign agents," Grassley wrote in the letter, retrieved by Reuters.

Twitter is yet to respond to this request from the senator.

Zatko stated that among other risks, a foreign agency could employ malware to steal the personal information of Twitter users and exploit it to access private data on the user's phone.

The letter to Parag Agrawal, the company's former CEO who ran it before Musk acquired it in a $44 billion deal in October, underlined some of the issues made in a previous letter to him that Republican Charles Grassley and Democrat Dick Durbin delivered to him in September.

Agrawal reportedly ignored the letter, citing a legal dispute with Musk, according to Grassley.

Twitter's General Amnesty

Elon Musk is still treading the waters of Twitter after a months-long rocky saga of whether he would complete his acquisition deal.

The new Chief Twit is now focused on considering the reinstatement of accounts that were banned from the platform due to violating rules against hate speech and misinformation.

He has recently posted a "general amnesty" for all the accounts that were banned, besides Kanye West and former US President Donald Trump, who were both brought back to the platform recently.

Musk also asserted that Twitter has been hiding certain significant secrets from the public, and he plans to uncover them while focusing on transparency to win back the trust of its users.

According to Chief Twit's most recent poll, it appears that more suspended accounts will regain their platforms thanks o Musk's era.

More than two million people have responded to the poll, and as of now, 72.1% of respondents have expressed their agreement to grant "General Amnesty" to the suspended accounts whose holders are still unable to access theirs.

Only 27.9% of respondents chose "No" and disapproved of Musk's plans for the platform.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Jace Dela Cruz