Sarah Palin email hack

On September 17, 2008, the private Yahoo! Mail account of Sarah Palin, Republican vice presidential candidate in the 2008 United States presidential election, was hacked by a 4chan user. The hacker known as "Rubico" at the time targeted Palin because he wanted to "derail her campaign."After reading through all of Palin's email the Rubico wrote "There was nothing there, nothing incriminating — all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor," The account was compromised by an individual who successfully guessed the answers to the Yahoo! Mail security questions that allow users to reset the password. The security questions enable users to recover accounts if they lose their password.Rubico wrote that he used the Sarah Palin Wikipedia article to find out Palin's exact birthday in "15 seconds", one of the standard security questions used by Yahoo. The hacker posted the account's password on /b/ a channel of 4chan, and screenshots from within the account to Wikileaks. A /b/ user then logged in and changed the password, posting a screenshot of his sending an email to a friend of Palin's informing her of the new password on the /b/ thread. However, he forgot to blank out the password in the screenshot. A multitude of /b/ users attempted to log in with the new password, the account was automatically locked out by Yahoo!. The incident was criticized by some /b/ users, one of which complained that "seriously, /b/. We could have changed history and failed, epically." The hacker admitted he was worried about being caught, writing "Yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was fucked, I panicked, I still wanted the stuff out there . . . so I posted the [information] . . . and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state." The hacker left behind traces of his activity, his IP address was logged at CTunnel, the single proxy he used, he also left his email address rubico10@yahoo.com when he posted at 4chan. Further the attacker revealed the original web address used by the proxy by leaving this information in the screenshot which according to experts can also help the investigation. 4chan is not archived, posts are only retained for a short time but with the great interest surrounding the posts of Rubico, many, inlcuding wired.com and others archived the original posts. The email address left behind was then connected to David Kernell through various social networking profiles where it was used, though no official investigation took place at this early time. John McCain's campaign condemned the incident saying it was a "shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law". Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton called the hacking "outrageous." Commentator Bill O'Reilly denounced the hacking and hackers in general on his show advocating long prison sentences for those involved including the operators of websites that posted the content obtained by the hack. As retaliation Bill O'Reilly's personal Web site, BillOReilly.com, was hacked the following day and personal information of about 200 of his subscribers were obtained.

The FBI and Secret Service began investigating the incident shortly after its occurrence. On September 20 it was revealed they had searched the residence of the son of Mike Kernell, a Democrat State Representative. Agents spent 1.5 to 2 hours taking pictures of everything inside his apartment. Kennel's three roommates were also subpoenaed and expected to testify the next week in Chattanooga. A grand jury is set to convene regarding the case on the 23th of September. Gabriel Ramuglia, the webmaster of Ctunnel, the proxy server used to commit the crime confirmed that the IP address of the hacker belongs to the ISP that provides internet to the apartment searched by the FBI He earlier stated that hacking was "against the terms of service" prompting him to cooperate and turn over relevant information to FBI.