Many G20 Delegates Were Interested in Seeing Carla Bruni Nude Pics

Delegates at the 2011 G20 summit in Paris were caught with their pants around their ankles, as it were, when unknown hackers sent a trojan horse email with the link, “To see naked pictures of Carla Bruni click here.”

The timeline of this security breach, as summarized by the New York Post, is nothing short of juicy:

This prompted many to open an attachment which turned out to be a ‘Trojan Horse’ with an embedded virus, although all recipients could see were the X-rated photographs.

Once accessed, the Trojan Horse infected the computers of senior officials as well as forwarding the offensive email on to others.

“Almost everybody who received the email took the bait,” said a government source in Paris, saying that this included representatives from the Czech Republic, Portugal, Bulgaria, Hungary and Latvia.

It never gets old when
international officials get caught doing something naughty when they’re
supposed to bring us world peace or something similarly lofty at these summits.
I imagine that part of the appeal of clicking was to give a “fuck you” to Bruni’s
husband, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s wildly unpopular president at the time.

But this story is also a serious one, given how frequent and damaging cyber attacks can be to national security. As of today, the email is still being circulated, and investigators still haven’t pinpointed the specific culprit.