Sarah Palin’s e-mail hacked
A hacker thought to be loosely associated with internet group Anonymous managed to hack into the email account of Alaskan Governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 16.
Partial contents of her email account – including two family photos, e-mail messages and contact lists – were subsequently hosted online at Wikileaks.org, a website that anonymously hosts leaked government and corporate documents. Anonymous, who were responsible for attacks on Scientology in the past, have claimed credit for the intrusion. The email account has been used by Palin for conducting government business and communication, circumventing transparency laws.
The hacker gained access to Palin’s account by answering Yahoo!’s security questions, finding the answers on websites like Wikipedia.org. The hacker was apparently careless and frightened, and posted the new password on 4chan.org as well as a few hasty screenshots. In the screenshots were proxy data, which Ctunnel.com owner Gabriel Ramuglia plans to use to help with FBI investigations.
“White hat” hackers, however, have discovered that the hacker’s online identity was linked to the email address of David Kernell, the son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell. When confronted, Kernell made no confirmation of that. While 4chan has deleted all images of the email account, the screenshots have quickly spread to blogs and news websites online.
Wikileaks Summary
Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) activists loosely affiliated with the group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com and passed information to Wikileaks. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, two example emails, address book and a couple of family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name tends to re-enforce the criticism.
The list of emails include an exchange with Alaskan Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell about his campaign for Congress.
Another screenshot shows Palin’s inbox and an e-mail from Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in 2007.
The e-mail, a message of support to Palin, tells her not to let negative press get to her and asks Palin to pray for McCorkell, who writes that “I need strength to 1. keep employment, 2. not have to choose.”
According to Kim Zetter of Wired Magazine, who looked at the Wikileaks archive, McCorkell confirmed that she did send the e-mail to Palin.
Subsequently tests by Wikileaks reveal that both Palin’s gov.palin AT yahoo.com and her unrelated gov.sarah AT yahoo.com account have now been deleted, almost certainly by Palin herself.
According to the Guardian, who also looked at the Wikileaks data, among the emails in Palin’s account were several from addresses belonging to her aides, including a draft letter to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a discussion of nominations to the state court of appeals, and several bearing “DPS”, the acronym for the Alaska Department of Public Safety.
DPS supervises the Alaska state troopers. Could the e-mails in question be relevant to the brewing ethics storm over Palin’s push to sack her former brother-in-law from the force?
Wikileaks may release additional emails should they prove be of political substance.
The ‘ctunnel.com’ reference in the browser screen shots is to a proxy service used to prevent the activists from being traced.
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