Twitter’s cybersecurity chief resigns from her post at a complex time for the platform

Washington ( Business) — Twitter’s chief information security officer announced her resignation Thursday, vacating one of the company’s most critical roles just as scrutiny mounts over Twitter’s future and the erratic decisions of its new owner, Elon Musk.

In a tweet, Lea Kissner, the former CISO, said she is waiting to hear what her next step will be.

I have made the difficult decision to leave Twitter. Kissner tweeted. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security and IT teams and the work we’ve done.”

Kissner did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did he publicly offer his reasons for leaving Twitter.

His resignation is the latest example of the internal turmoil that has rocked Twitter following mass layoffs at the company.

Apparently, Kissner’s departure coincided with the resignations of many other top Twitter officials on Wednesday night over fears of the company’s legal exposure to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), according to an internal Slack message seen by . the freelance journalist Casey Newton Y TheVerge they were the first to report the resignations.

In the Slack message, a Twitter employee wrote that Musk’s only priority is to “recover the losses he is incurring as a result of not getting out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter.”

The employee’s post also claimed that Musk’s focus on monetizing the platform could endanger vulnerable users, including human rights activists and political dissidents.

It could even put Twitter’s own employees in legal jeopardy, the message suggested, after the employee claimed Musk didn’t care about Twitter’s possible FTC liability.

The employee claimed to have heard Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney and, according to the message, Twitter’s new head of legal affairs, say that “Elon puts rockets in space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.”

Spiro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Twitter has twice settled with that agency over user privacy violations, and is facing accusations from its former chief security officer, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, that the company, under former CEO Parag Agrawal , had violated its obligations to the FTC for the third time. If proven true, Zatko’s allegations could result in billions of dollars in fines and personal liability for Agrawal.

The message outlined Twitter’s plans to delegate FTC compliance responsibilities to individual workers who remain with the company.

“This will pose an enormous personal, professional and legal risk to engineers,” the message warned, according to The Verge. “I anticipate that all of you will be under pressure from management to push through changes that will likely lead to major incidents.”