A French court this week convicted a man accused of hacking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and other celebrities, as well as obtaining private Twitter business documents that were eventually published on TechCrunch.

Francois Cousteix, a 24-year-old Frenchman who went by the online name Hacker Croll, was given a five-month suspended sentence, the AP reported.

The news comes the day after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement with Twitter over charges that the micro-blogging site failed to adequately safeguard user information, leading to the Cousteix incident and a separate attack.

"There were two different incidents involving two different hackers," a Twitter spokesman said in a Friday e-mail. "The breach involving Hacker Croll, who was convicted today, was in April 2009 and 10 Twitter accounts were affected. The earlier breach, in Jan. 2009, involved a different hacker."

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