Twitter Hacker Gets Slap on the Wrist
A French court this week convicted a man accused of hacking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and other celebrities, as well as obtaining private Twitter business documents that were eventually published on TechCrunch.
A French court this week convicted a man accused of hacking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and other celebrities, as well as obtaining private Twitter business documents that were eventually published on TechCrunch.
Francois Cousteix, a 24-year-old Frenchman who went by the online name Hacker Croll, was given a five-month suspended sentence, the AP reported.
The news comes the day after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over charges that the micro-blogging site failed to adequately safeguard user information, leading to the Cousteix incident and a separate attack.
"There were two different incidents involving two different hackers," a Twitter spokesman said in a Friday e-mail. "The breach involving Hacker Croll, who was convicted today, was in April 2009 and 10 Twitter accounts were affected. The earlier breach, in Jan. 2009, involved a different hacker."
Cousteix managed to hack into difference access points, the spokesman said, "one related to our internal documents and another related to our system for sharing documents."
This allowed him to view the accounts of some high-profile users, including President Obama. Twitter said in April 2009 that the only information that was visible was e-mail address, mobile phone number, and a list of accounts blocked by that user. Password information and direct messages were not revealed.
Mastering some easily decipherable administrative passwords, Cousteix did manage to secure access to internal Twitter documents, which he shopped around to various tech blogs. TechCrunch eventually .
The AP reported that Cousteix's defense was that he was trying to demonstrate Twitter's vulnerability. "It's a message I wanted to get out to Internet users, to show them that no system is invulnerable," he told a French TV station.
In January Cousteix was convicted of diverting funds from a gambling Web site to pay for computer parts. He received an eight-month suspended sentence, AP said. He will now return to his job at tech company Rentabiliweb, a job he got thanks to the publicity surrounding his hacking trial.