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Police Arrest French Hacker Who Attacked Obama's Twitter Account

by Amar Toor on March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM

Perhaps no other person in the world is kept under closer security than President Obama. His Twitter account, on the other hand... not so much.

A small gap in Presidential security was publicly exposed Wednesday, as French police, in coordination with the FBI, arrested a man who'd successfully hacked his way into Obama's Twitter. The (not surprisingly) unemployed 25-year old Frenchman, who goes by the pseudonym 'Hacker Croll,' originally sabotaged Obama's account in April, 2009, and the FBI alerted the French police to his presence on French soil in August. The prolonged investigation, in typical Franco fashion, has now officially come to a close some six months later, with yesterday's arrest.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Hacker Croll also managed to weasel his way into Facebook and Gmail accounts before sabotaging celebrity Twitter pages last April. Strangely enough, French state prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat claims that the hacker never intended to make any profit off of his attacks, but only conducted them to prove that he could. While he didn't actually change anything (or even post new tweets to the pages he targeted), he did manage to post screenshots of the accounts he hacked to chat forums around the Web. Coquillat also maintains that "the man in question had no training in computers," but was simply "very cunning."

Sabotaging a Presidential Twitter page isn't quite on the same alert level as, say, crashing a State dinner. Ultimately, the Frenchman didn't do as much damage as he could have. But at the very least, it should serve as a wake up call to government security authorities. One of the best things about Twitter is the fact that it puts us within a click's reach of world leaders and celebrities, and we certainly encourage Obama to tweet even more than he does. The tradeoff, though, lies in the vulnerability that's inherent to nearly every online forum today and the security holes that must always be closely guarded. We're just lucky that Hacker Croll wasn't really interested in manipulating the President's words. Because even though an attack on his Twitter account may not directly affect his (or our) physical security, it could change Obama's words. For someone whose words alone can affect real change, that's important enough. [From: WSJ]

Tags: barack obama, BarackObama, fbi, france, french, hacker, obama, security, social networking, SocialNetworking, top, twitter, web

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