October 14, 2008, 5:39 AM — So it happened again. Another email account broken into. This time it wasn’t the glitterati – read Paris Hilton - that got stung. Nor was it an office staffer such as what Kenneth Kwak did at the Department of Education a couple years ago - see www.//news.cnet.com/2100-7350_3-6071928.html. But instead it was a Vice-Presidential candidate’s email account. Governor Sarah Palin ruefully used an external email service to send emails out of her gov.palin@yahoo.com account.
What she exposed was her own personal and family information as well as emails related to the Alaskan governor’s work. When you use a public email service such as yahoo.com you run the risk of public exposure. A hacker can employ password recovery techniques to gain access to private email.
In the case of Sarah Palin, that is exactly what has happened. Or at least that is what happened according to a post on a 4chan.org message board by someone claiming to be the person responsible for breaking into Sarah Palin’s email account.
This person’s account of how he broke into Sarah Palin’s account can be found at www.michellemalkin.com/2008/09/17/the-story-behind-the-palin-e-mail-hack...
I will warn you that there is profanity on that posting. The hacker used information found on Wikipedia and Google to discover Sarah Palin’s birthday and zip code. The hacker used this information to pass through the first level of security – the username/password level. The second level consisted of a security question about where Sarah Palin met her spouse. The hacker did some research and made an educated guess and voila he was in as Sarah Palin. Read the rest of this article
