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French suspect grilled over Obama Twitter hack

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A French suspect has been arrested over accusations he hacked into the Twitter accounts of President Obama and other public figures, the BBC reports.

The unnamed 25-year-old was questioned by French police after an arrest on Tuesday and following a months-long investigation involving the FBI.

Investigators reckon the suspect hacked into micro-blogging accounts run by Obama and celebrities including Britney Spears via the basic ploy of successfully guessing the answer to password reminder questions used by targeted accounts. The same approach was famously used to hack into a Yahoo! webmail account maintained for former US vice-president candidate Sarah Palin.

Adeline Champagnat, head of the French central office against online fraud, said the Twitter hack suspect (who used the online handle Hacker Croll) had no particular computer skills. The unemployed man was released on police bail pending further inquiries and a court appearance, scheduled for Clermont-Ferrand on 24 June.

It's unclear if and how compromised Twitter accounts were misused. Spears' account, in particular, has been hacked multiple times by scallywags. ®

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Dear Mr. President,

In the future, when answering a security question such as "What is your mother's maiden name?" Lie. It's ok, it really is. Why? Well, if you put Dunham, it isn't really that secure now is it? How did I know that? It's easy, there is this thing called Google and while nobody really knows how it works, it finds all kinds of things like that. No, you shouldn't worry about it, you have more pressing things such as how to maintain a Democrat majority after that whole health care fiasco. Yes, it really was and your opponents are screaming on the outside but have that smug joyous inner smile. Now then, stop wasting perfectly good tax dollars having the FBI coordinate with French police over a silly twit and take a basic lesson in online security.

Yours pal,

Eddy

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uhmm....

Surely it's not a Hack as such?

Guessing a "secret question"...heck in fact someone having what would be a considered a fairly important public facing feed with a security question that can be guessed by someone who's first language isn't even the same is pretty poor to start with..but then a twitter feed's hardly going to start wwIII or divulge state secrets now is it?

"Obama lost his mobile - could world leaders please call him on the new cell at xxxxxxxxxx"

"Obama things china should suck his chocolate salty ones, what you gonna do about it!*

"China declared war on USA."

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Gateway Hack

The incident is dangerous because the next step is hacking into Obama's TelePrompTer.

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