Twitter has come under scrutiny yet again after a whistleblower highlighted the security issues that persist on the website. According to The Washington Post, this individual, who has spoken to both Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), claims that some Twitter engineers still have access to an internal program called "GodMode" which allows them to tweet from any account. This means that irrespective of the password protection, your Twitter account can be accessed at any given point.
As per reports by Wall Street Journal, the program has now been renamed to "privileged mode", but the whistleblower alleges that it remains on the laptops of any engineer who wants it and can be accessed by making a simple code change. This code change involves switching "FALSE" to "TRUE".
The whistleblowers' complaint further states that the program, even though it has been renamed, still requires only a production computer and a simple code change to access. Screenshots of the code, included in an October complaint filed with the FTC, show a warning to anyone attempting to use it: "THINK BEFORE YOU DO THIS."
This isn't the first time Twitter has been pulled up for breaching the security of users . In 2020, teenage crypto scammers hacked the company's internal systems, sending fake tweets from the accounts of President Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and other high-profile figures. At the time, Twitter's executives stated that they had fixed the issue and launched a "comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information."
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