Celebrity Twitter hacker caught by French police

A French hacker who is alleged to have broken into Twitter’s internal administration system, giving him access to the details of millions of Twitter users including those of Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and Lily Allen, has been arrested by French authorities.

The unemployed 25-year-old man, who still lives with his parents and goes by the online handle of “Hacker Croll”, was questioned by police in Clermont-Ferrand, and according to French police explained how he gained access to Twitter’s internal systems in April 2009, exposing the email addresses of celebrity accounts, mobile phone numbers (if one was associated with the account), and the list of accounts blocked by the affected user.

Adeline Champagnat, of the French cybercrime unit, said that was able to access information about the famous Twitter users by breaking into accounts belonging to Twitter’s own…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.