Frenchman who attacked Obama and Spears Twitter accounts denies ‘hacking’

A FRENCHMAN who broke into Barack Obama and Britney Spears’ Twitter feeds insisted yesterday he is no hacker but a “kind pirate” seeking to expose security weaknesses.

“I did not act with a destructive aim... I wanted to warn them, to show up the faults in the system,” said the 23-year-old, who was arrested on Tuesday after an operation by French police and FBI agents.

The unemployed computer technician wore a pair of slippers adorned with smiley faces as he sat in his parents’ home in central France and told of how he broke into the micro-blogging sites.

Francois C, who spoke to reporters on condition that his full surname not be used, is accused of breaking into Twitter and Google accounts, including ones used by US President Obama and pop star Spears.

He has been bailed and is due to appear in court on June 24 and faces up to two years in jail if convicted of hacking into a database.

Francois took the name “Hacker Croll” from a figure in the Pacman video game he loved as a child and used it as an online pseudonym to brag about attacks on Twitter.

In order to break into Twitter he said he got access to the mailboxes of the company’s employees by “guessing their passwords” or figuring them out by studying their Facebook pages, blogs or other websites.

In April last year he finally cracked the site’s administrator codes and then got into personal accounts and made screen captures which he posted on chat forums, he said.

“Everyone thought it was a joke until Twitter complained,” he said.

He attacked Twitter simply to show “that big companies are no more secure than any internet user. That’s the message I wanted to get across”.

“I am not a hacker. I am a kind pirate,” said Francois.

Local prosecutor Jean- Yves Coquillat agreed. “He is not a hacker in the classic sense. He entered a house whose door had been left open.”

Last year Francois was given a suspended eight- month prison sentence and a small fine for gambling online with money that did not belong to him.

In July, leading US tech blog TechCrunch.com reported it received a file containing 310 confidential corporate and personal documents from “Hacker Croll” about Twitter and the firm’s employees.

TechCrunch said the documents included minutes of executive meetings, partnership agreements, financial projections, calendars, phone logs, office plans and other information. The blog published some of the documents.

Twitter founder Evan Williams confirmed to TechCrunch at the time that documents had been obtained, but insisted the hacker did not gain access to any Twitter user accounts.