Friday, March 26, 2010

French Hacker Arrested

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that a 24-year-old Frenchman could face up to two years in a French prison if convicted of hacking into the Twitter accounts of two U.S. citizens -- President Barack Obama and Britney Spears.

His name wasn't released, but his pseudonym is "Hacker Croll" -- and he lives with his parents.

Posing as a site administrator in April 2009, he hacked just to see if he could do it; but he did not post anything on the accounts. He did take screen shots, which he shared on Internet chat forums, according to the prosecutor in the case.

It took a joint operation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the French police to track him down. Because the crime was committed in France, he will be tried under French laws for fraudulent access to a computer system.

In addition to jail time, he could be fined up to 30,000 Euros if found guilty.

He was freed after questioning but is due in court on June 24. Maybe he has sworn off the Internet. The Wall Street Journal reported he hadn't replied to the reporter's email seeking comment.

5 comments:

fatima almarzouqi said...

The fact that someone has done this is all the reason you need to keep personal data safe by minimising the amount that goes online. Everyday there is some story about the negative safety aspects of online banking, buying and selling or message services. It is unethical job and he deserve to be fined.

Unknown said...

I dont trust online banking, buying,and selling. I think that when there is something called (Hackers) we can't trust doing our personel services online!

Safaa . S said...

From doing my research about HACKERS I now realize that the Internet in not a totally safe place for us to exchange sensitive information of our personal stuff because it lead HACKERS to reach our personal information and use it as if its their own stuff such as our bank account.

Fatema A said...



That's too much I think. Hacking one of the most active pages in twitter is something really big and serious. I never trust anybody in the internet. I try all my best to protect my privacy. I even do not give my second name and just give my first name. I do not share my email and do not accept random people or people who just add me on Msn, Skype or yahoo. I find it so hard for me to talk about myself or my family even with girls I met in the internet, it might end up chatting with boys LOL. I faced many situations when my flickr account got hacked last year when I entered from a university's Mac PC. I remember myself logging out but when I got back home I found out that all my gallery pictures have been deleted and the hacker printed screened pictures of parts of my face and draw silly drawings on them and wrote very bad things about me and he even used bad language. With the help of my brother I got my account back and sent a virus file to the hacker and destroyed his computer.





Fatema Abubaker was Here :D

Fatima . M . Al Ali said...

Hackers are really sick people,
I do not know why they do that. Once my hotmail account hacked when I was in the first year in the university, till now I do not get my email back. From that time I make sure that i do not keep my personal things whether in my email or in my laptop, I always save all my stuff in a hard drive so no boy can find my personal information.