On Thursday, French police arrested a man who allegedly hacked into celebrity Twitter accounts in the United States. Among his victims was President Barack Obama.
French authorities described the hacker as a 24-year-old Frenchman. Rather than revealing his true identity, police are publicly calling him “Hacker Croll,” a pseudonym the hacker used during his criminal activities. However, the Associated Press has identified him as Francois Cousteix.
“He was a young man spending time on the Internet,” French prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat told London’s Telegraph newspaper. “He acted as a result of a bet, out of the arrogance of the hacker. He is the type who likes to claim responsibility for what he has done.”
Easy as 1, 2, 3?
Cousteix allegedly accessed Obama’s Twitter page, as well as the Twitter pages of famous people like Britney Spears and Lily Allen, by guessing passwords, according to French police.
Whether Cousteix obtained any sensitive information from the president’s micro-blog was not disclosed. However, news reports put Cousteix on the scene of the crime of dozens of Facebook and Twitter account hacks. Cousteix could spend up to two years in prison on each count of hacking if convicted.
“For a long time, when people got caught for doing this stuff, they got some kind of lucrative security job,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “Nowadays companies realize that providing incentives to people who are hacking this stuff wasn’t a wise thing to do.”
Although French authorities took the lead on the investigation, they reportedly relied on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to monitor Cousteix’s online activities. The FBI also reportedly took part in the arrest of the hacker.
No System is Invulnerable
Cousteix has admitted to hacking. “I’m a nice hacker … It’s a message I wanted to get out to Internet users, to show them that no system is…