Hackers gain access to Sarkozy's bank account

Cybercrime might well be on the increase, but you would have thought the person holding a country's highest office would be safer than the rest of us.

Well apparently not - at least not here in France - according to a story revealed in today's edition of the national newspaper, le Journal du Dimanche (LJDD).

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had his personal bank account hacked into, the newspaper revealed, and "small transactions" had been made.

Sarkozy made an official complaint in September after it was discovered, and a police investigation was immediately launched, his office confirmed on Saturday.

The question currently concerning investigators is how someone managed to gain access to Sarkozy's personal accounts.

According to Christophe Naudin, a criminologist at one of the capital's universities, it was probably much in the same was as criminals gain access to anyone's account.

"Direct hacking would be rare," he told TF1 news. "There are a lot of attempts made, but not many of them are successful," he said.

"It's much more likely that someone managed to get hold of (hard copy) documents containing some element of his banking details, and it was by pure chance that it happened to be his (Sarkozy's) details, he added.

"It could just have well been any other French citizen."

Whatever the method of getting hold of his details, there has been a crime involved and Sarkozy's private account has been hacked into via the Internet

And in the last 12 months, there has been a nine percent rise in such cases according to official statistics, with one of the weak points being the passwords assigned to the Carte Bleue many French carry around with them.

Carte Bleue is a debit card and not a credit card, with a personalised four digit pin-code, which cannot be changed.

Every time you make a payment using the card, there will also be some sort of paper trail via a receipt, which could lead the more unscrupulous among back to an individual's bank account.

Perhaps that should serve as a word of warning to all us every time we make a payment using our credit cards, or Carte Bleue to keep a tight hold on all receipts rather than simply bin them without thinking.

The issue of passwords was also a point taken up by Georges Liberman, the president of Xiring, a company that ensures the security of online banking transactions.

He said that the weak point of the current system here in France was that online access to bank accounts was made using the account number and a password, which although different for each person (and from the one used for the Carte Bleue) could on the whole never be changed. It too remains the same.

Once "cracked" the door would be wide open to hacking.

All the stops may have been pulled to discover who was behind the hacking and how and they gained access to Sarkozy's accounts.

But after a month of investigations, and with the public prosecutor of Nanterre, Philippe Courroye leading the inquiry police are, according to LJDD, no further along in actually discovering "whodunnit".