Twittergate hacker gets five-month prison sentence

The 24-year-old French hacker responsible for leaking internal strategy documents to TechCrunch and breaking into celebrity Twitter accounts last summer received a five-month suspended prison sentence.

Given the steeper penalties Francois Cousteix was facing, including two years in prison and a 30,000 euro fine, his lawyer said they were pleased with the decision.

“The verdict is satisfying, given all the media pressure that built up,” his lawyer Jean-Francois Canis told the Associated Press.

Cousteix, who went by the name Hacker Croll, broke into the accounts of celebrities including U.S. President Barack Obama. Notably, he said he had never gotten any special computer training. Cousteix’s exploits have won him a job at Rentabiliweb, a French micropayments startup, which he’ll return to once he finishes the prison sentence.

Twitter’s security vulnerabilities last year led to a Federal Trade Commission inquiry. The FTC said yesterday that it cracked down on the service for having security holes like easy-to-guess administrative passwords and no special log-in page for administrators.