Obama’s twitter account hacker caught in France
The name “Hacker Croll” is becoming quite the household name these days. 
Well, that is if you have been online in the past week – and have not been living under a rock for the past while.
So, who is “Hacker Croll”? Well this is man is none other than the hacker that successfully managed to enter into the accounts of high profile celebrities, the likes of Britney spears and President Obama.
Accordingly, his antics have not been taken lightly, and in an attempt to find out exactly who this malevolent hacker was, the FBI teamed up with local French authorities, to apprehend and charge the hacker.
it has been reported that according to Hacker Croll, his infiltration into these many high profile accounts was quite easily carried out.
According to an independent Security news reporter, Nik Cubrilovic (from TechCrunch), he suggests that : “Hacker Croll was successful by using the same combination of patience, sheer determination and somewhat elementary methods to gain access to a frightening number of accounts and services related to Twitter and Twitter employees. In the case of the Twitter attacks, public information allowed him to create a catalogue of data that included a list of employee names, their associated email addresses and their roles within the company. He was also able to find and log information such as birth dates, names of pets and other seemingly innocent pieces of data. Croll also claimed that forgotten password links and detection of a user who used static passwords across several websites, allowed him to get the password easily. Croll goes on to say: “On requesting to recover the password, Gmail informed me that an email had been sent to the user’s secondary email account. In an effort to balance usability with security, Gmail offered a hint as to which account the email to reset the password was being sent to, in case the user required a gentle reminder.”
It appears that it was solely the result of easy password identifications which enabled Hacker Croll to enter into the various twitter and Gmail accounts.
When the culprit in question was asked to comment on his past endeavors, he had the following to say:
“I would like to offer my personal apology to Twitter. I think this company has a great future ahead of it. I did not do this to profit from the information. Security is an area that fascinated me for many years and I want to do my job. In my everyday life, I help people to guard against the dangers of the internet. I learned the basic rules. For example: be careful where you click the files that you download and what you type on the keyboard. Ensure that the computer is equipped with effective protection against viruses, external attacks, spam, and phishing. Upgrading the operating system, software commonly used. Remember to use passwords without any similarity between them. Remember to change them regularly. Never store confidential information on the computer. I hope that my intervention will be repeated to show how easy it can be for a malicious person to gain access to sensitive information without too much knowledge.”
I light of this, I think we can safely say that Hacker Croll is no more dangerous than your usual IT guy, and perhaps his little adventures into others Twitter and Gmail accounts is somewhat of a blessing in disguise – as he has alerted us all to the fact that hackers are real – and malicious intents are just a click away – so remain vigilant – and don’t use the same passwords across the boars – as some intelligent hacker, may have the know-how and be able to decipher your most intricate passwords.
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