14 DAY TRIAL // A 22-year-old student was arrested by Thailand law enforcement in the case of the hacked Twitter account belonging to Yingluck Shinawatra, the recently appointed Prime Minister.
According to Graham Cluley, the suspect, Aekawit Thongdeeworakul, is a fourth year architecture scholar at Chulalongkorn University and for his deeds he could be sentenced to up to two years of imprisonment for violating the law which forbids the accessing of a computing system without authorization.
Recently we've discussed the case of the Prime Minister whose Twitter account and possibly even Facebook profile has been overtaken to post protesting messages.
"If she can't even protect her own Twitter account, how can she protect the country?" read one of the messages.
ICT Minister, Anudith Nakornthap, revealed for the press that Thongdeeworakul got hold of the passwords belonging to the PM after her Gmail account had been hacked and sensitive information was leaked on the internet.
The student tried to cover his tracks by using a new SIM card on the phone from which the tweets were posted, but that didn't cover him much as the IP address that was used to access the profile ultimately gave him away.
After being arrested, he revealed to the authorities that he is truly the one responsible for the crime, but he didn't think of his deeds as being a big deal, however, they might prosecute him as an example to others.
A similar event occurred recently in Singapore, where a polytechnic student, after finding the credentials of certain internauts that were leaked by LulzSec, changed their passwords in the attempt to protect them from possible thefts.
He believed that if he would change the accounts to their original passwords after things settled down, he would protect the personal information hosted on them.
Even though his intentions were in the right place, what makes him different from the everyday black hat as he could have just as easily stolen sensitive information from the ones he claimed to be protecting.