Twitter security new revelations! Whistleblower claims GodMode still available

Elon Musk’s Twitter is once again under scrutiny for its dismal state of privacy protections. According to The Washington Post, a former Twitter employee has told members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the company’s engineer can still activate ‘GodMode’.

“A new Twitter whistleblower has emerged, supporting last year’s surprising testimony about the dismal state of the company’s privacy protections and saying the company continues to violate its legal obligations under new owner Elon Musk,” The Washington Post report says.

For those unaware, GodMode is an internal program which allows them to access any Twitter account and tweet from the account. Allegations against Twitter ‘GodMode’ were made in a complaint filed in October last year by a nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid with the FTC. The law firm is interviewing former employees. The latest whistleblower report is part of these interviews.

The complaint had screenshots of the code in question. As per the screenshot, the program line contains the capitalized comment: “THINK BEFORE YOU DO THIS.”

Our readers must note that concerns about security at Twitter first emerged in 2020. The microblogging platform has been subject to hack by teenage crypto scammers in 2020 when accounts of some eminent personalities were hacked, sending fake tweets from them. The accounts were – President Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Warren Buffet, Kanye West and others.

The company’s executive then said that the issue is fixed and that it has launched a "comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information."

The new complaint says that “the existence of GodMode is one more example that Twitter’s public statements to users and investors were false and/or misleading.” “Our client has a reasonable belief that the evidence in this disclosure demonstrates legal violations by Twitter,” it adds.

In an anonymous interview with The Post, the whistleblower said that the purpose of the program was to allow Twitter staff to tweet on behalf of advertisers unable to do it themselves. However, following internal objections about the program, engineers changed its name to “privileged mode.”

The latest report by The Post backs claims by former Twitter security head Peiter Zatko who came forward for a testimony last year who made sweeping claims then.