A former head of security of Twitter has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing the social media platform company of “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its practices around spam and hacker attacks.

Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, in the complaint filed on July 6 to the SEC, Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission, says Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the FTC by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan.

The FTC deal prohibited Twitter from “misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorised access to nonpublic information and honour the privacy choices made by consumers.” for 20 years. 

Mr Zatko alleges he had raised concerns that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software. 

In the complaint, Mr Zatko claimed that on December 14, 2021, Mr Agrawal “explicitly instructed Mudge to provide documents which both of them knew to be misleading.”  He followed that in January, he started gathering evidence of “fraud,” and Twitter’s chief compliance officer opened an investigation based on his allegations.

Mr Zatko accuses Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives and directors of “extensive legal violations”. These span public misleading statements to users, misrepresentations to investors and acting with “negligence and even complicity” toward efforts by foreign governments to infiltrate the platform.

Mr Zatko joined Twitter in late 2020 and was terminated by the company in January. The company claims that Mr Zatko was dismissed for claims of poor performance. 

“Mr Zatko was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “What we’ve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”

Mr Zatko’s complaint comes as Tesla CEO Musk and Twitter are embroiled in a legal battle. Mr Musk called off his $44 billion agreement to buy the social media company,  accusing Twitter of lying about the true number of bot and spam accounts on the platform. In return, Twitter sued Mr Musk, pressuring him to follow through with the acquisition agreement.