The Associated Press reported today that French authorities interviewed Francois Cousteix, or better known by his online name "Hacker Troll", for 2 days while the FBI sat in on the investigation. As an unemployed person, with admittedly very little computer savvy, Mr. Cousteix insists that the only motivation for hacking into the Twitter accounts of people like President Barack Obama and Britney Spears was to highlight just how vulnerable data is online. According to the report:
"'[Hacker Troll] 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. [Ms. Champagnat] 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."
In a week where the headlines in the U.S. were dominated by the Healthcare debate in Washington, D.C., the push by U.S. politicians to put medical records available online should be given a moment of pause as situations like the case involving the Hacker Troll become more frequent. Clearly, most lawyers in the U.S. do not understand, nor respect, the magnitude of this very real problem – that’s why they are unable to legislate it. Like employment practices were in the mid-1980’s so to is data governance in this new decade of the new millenium. Businesses need to do a better job of self-regulating the transfer, both internally and externally, of data to ensure damage to reputation is mitigated as best as possible.
To read more about this report, please click here: Suspected Twitter Infiltrator: "I’m a nice hacker"
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed article on medical records not being secure online: Your Medical Records Aren’t Secure