I'm no hacker, says man who cracked Obama's Twitter 
 
 BEAUMONT, France — A Frenchman who broke into Barack Obama and Britney Spears' Twitter feeds insisted 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 AFP 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. 
 
 In April last year he finally cracked the site's administrator codes and then got into the accounts of people like Obama and make screen captures which he posted on chat forums, he said. 
 
 "Everyone thought it was a joke until Twitter complained," he said. 
 
 Francois, the eldest of six children, lives with his parents in their modest home in Beaumont, a small town of 12,000 people near Clermont-Ferrand, the city where he will go on trial in June. 
 
 His mother told AFP that her son had "always been very introverted." 
 
 "I don't know anything about computers," she said. "I knew he spent a lot of time on his computer but I never thought it would end like this." 
 
 Francois said he does not go out much and spends up to 10 hours a day surfing the web. "It's my only passion," he said. 
 
 His father gave him his first computer when he was eight. He got into video games and then started exploring the Internet when he was 14, 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, who did a computer technician course last year but has been unable to find a job. 
 
 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." 
 
 This is not the first time Francois has been in trouble with the law. Last year he was given a suspended eight-month prison sentence and a small fine for gambling online with money that did not belong to him, police said. 
 
 San Francisco-based Twitter did not immediately reply to an email from AFP about his arrest while the FBI said it was looking into the report. 
 
 In July, leading US technology blog TechCrunch.com reported it had 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. 
 
 Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More » 

 He's unemployed and isn't much of a computer expert. The Frenchman accused of infiltrating Twitter and peeping at the accounts of President Barack Obama and singers Britney Spears and Lily Allen says he wanted to reveal just how vulnerable online data systems are to break-ins _ and he says he didn't mean any harm. 
 
 "I'm a nice hacker," suspect Francois Cousteix told France 3 television Thursday, a day after he was released from police questioning, adding that his goal was to warn Internet users about data security. 
 
 "Hacker Croll," as he was known online, is accused of breaking into Twitter administrators' accounts and copying confidential data _ as well as peeping at Obama's and the singers' accounts, though he didn't have access to sensitive information about them, a French prosecutor said. 
 
 FBI agents sat in on the sessions while French police questioned the young man for two days, said Jean-Yves Coquillat, prosecutor in Clermont-Ferrand, where the suspect will be tried in June for hacking. 
 
 If convicted on the charge of breaking into a data system, he risks up to two years in prison and a euro30,000 ($40,068) fine. The suspect lives near Clermont-Ferrand in central France. 
 
 "He says it's the challenge, the game, that made him do it," Coquillat said. Officials say preliminary investigations suggest Hacker Croll did not tweet in other peoples' names or try to make money out of his information. 
 
 "He had access to elements that were so confidential that he could very well have profited from them" through blackmail, for example, said Adeline Champagnat of the French police office on information technology crimes. 
 
 She compared the hacker's actions to "a burglar breaking into the headquarters of a big company, able to look at the files of the all employees and clients, with their passwords and confidential information." 
 
 "In a way, he succeeded in taking control of Twitter," Champagnat said. 
 
 At one point, she said, the hacker attempted to find a password for Obama's account but didn't follow through with it. With administrator access, "he didn't even need" Obama's password, she said _ but hacking into the president's account wasn't his goal. 
 
 Cousteix, who was identified as being 23 or 24, said he just wanted to prove a point about Internet security. 
 
 "It's a message I wanted to get out to Internet users, to show them that no system is invulnerable," he told France 3 television. 
 
 Hacker Croll confessed to the hacking under questioning, and analysis of his computer backs up his statements, police and the prosecutor said. 
 
 The suspect, who lives with his parents and has no college degree, didn't have any special computer training, the prosecutor said. 
 
 His technique was to get administrators' e-mail passwords' reset by correctly answering their security questions using information about his prey that he gathered from blogs and other public sites, officials said. 
 
 Twitter said in July that it was the victim of a security breach. Co-founder Biz Stone wrote at the time that the personal e-mail of an unnamed Twitter administrative employee was hacked, and through that the attacker got access to the employee's Google Apps account. 
 
 The French prosecutor said the suspect infiltrated the accounts of "several" Twitter administrative employees. He was able to access information such as contracts with partners and resumes from job applicants, Coquillat said. 
 
 Hacker Croll e-mailed some of the documents to TechCrunch, a widely read technology blog, and it subsequently published some of them, including financial projections. The material was also published on several French sites. 
 
 Some of the material was more embarrassing than damaging, like floor plans for new office space and a pitch for a Twitter TV show. 
 
 Using the administrator logins, Hacker Croll looked at Twitter details of Obama, Allen, Spears and other well-known personalities and was able to see information such as IP addresses, when they were last connected and when they signed up, French officials said. 
 
 ___ 
 
 APTN producer Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris contributed to this report.
– The man who cracked Barack Obama's Twitter account says he was merely trying to point out security weaknesses in the system. Francois Cousteix, an unemployed 23-year-old from France, describes himself as a "kind pirate" who used low-tech methods of guessing passwords, often aided by info on the Facebook pages of Twitter employees. "I am not a hacker," he tells AFP. "I did not act with a destructive aim." Cousteix says he attacked Twitter and high-profile users like Obama and Britney Spears to show "that big companies are no more secure than any Internet user. That's the message I wanted to get across." Known as "Hacker Croll" online, he is scheduled to go on trial in June and faces 2 years in prison on hacking charges, notes AP.