Beaumont: A Frenchman who broke into Barack
Obama and Britney Spears` Twitter feeds insisted on Thursday 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 Tuesday after an operation by
French police and FBI agents.
The curly-haired 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 popular micro-blogging site.
Francois C, who spoke to agency 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, which lets
users send out messages of up to 140 characters.
In order to break into Twitter he said 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.
PTI
