Frenchman arrested for hacking Obama's Twitter account

BEIJING, March 25 (Xinhuanet) -- A 25-year-old Frenchman has been arrested by police for hacking the Twitter account of U.S. President Barack Obama, according to Reuters Thursday.

The unemployed man, who has also targeted the Twitter accounts of other celebrities including singer Britney Spears, is under arrest in the central French town of Clermont Ferrand.

The hacker, who used the online handle Hacker Croll, had no specialist training and is said to have hacked into the micro-blogging website by simply guessing users' passwords.

"He didn't get as far as their personal accounts. But he had gained control of Twitter," Captain Adeline Champagnat, a senior member of the police cyber crimes unit, told Reuters Television.

But the suspect never attempted to make money from his hacking activities, Champagnat added, saying, "It was simply to show that he was able to access accounts of Twitter members. And the best proof of that is that he did screen grabs of certain confidential data which he tried to post on blogs that are reserved for pirates or hackers."

Several FBI agents, who alerted the suspect's presence in the French territory in July 2009, were in France to help the French police carry out searches.