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Blog Entry 168 of 168 Dot's Droppings

Blog Url: http://denver.yourhub.com/~DotsDroppings

Droppings: Teenage hackers get in Palin's e-mail?

Contributed by: Dot the Dog   on 9/17/2008

Update: Looks like the story's gone national. You can check out the Associated Press's take on it here.


File under "Grain of Salt," but buzz on the net is that Alaskan governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account was broken into by teenage hackers.

Members of anonymous internet board 4Chan (note: site is not safe for work and contains explicit content) claim to have hacked into Palin's e-mail. The claims are hard, if not impossible, to verify, but if so, it may have been as simple as knowing her ZIP code.

The series of events, which members are referring to as "The Incident," was set into motion by a Washington Post article regarding attorneys' requests of Palin to release more than 1,000 e-mails from a personal e-mail account on which government business was allegedly conducted and, thus, subject to government record-keeping regulations.

Click here to see the alleged e-mails hosted on Wikileaks.

The article included Palin's e-mail address, based on Yahoo!, setting off a storm of attempts to break in by hackers, sleuths and bored netizens. A poster at the Something Awful forums, by the nickname Buchanandorf, noted how easy the task would be to a would-be hacker. "Once you enter the secret question correctly it prompts you to enter a new password for the account. If you correctly enter Sarah Palin's zip code into the box, you will gain complete control over her yahoo account." (emphasis his.)

Within minutes, prospective breakers-in were locked out by Yahoo e-mail's security measures, which close an account after a number of failed attempts to log in.

It was not long thereafter, though, when 4chan members began posting screenshots they claim are from the inbox of Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account, as well as lists of names and e-mail addresses, and what appear to be personal photos of family members. The original discussion thread was posted to Digg but has since been deleted.

One image, hosted online alongside the photos, was captioned: "If there was a smoking gun, Anon would accept jail time for exposing it, but that kind of information has not come to light at this time." Indeed, what little correspondence posted appears to be mundane -- a few unkind words for progressive radio host Dan Fagan as well as family correspondence. Web host Photobucket has since pulled the images from its site.

Still, the incident (or The Incident,) is offering plenty of laughs to some of Palin's online detractors. Back at Something Awful, poster Armond Poopson wrote "seriously I don't use yahoo mail for my fantasy football information because it's too easy to break into and I got like fifty bucks riding on this league."

A poster at news aggregator Reddit was unimpressed: "Who breaks into Fort Knox, has the entire place to himself, and then leaves after stealing a the pen from the front desk?"

Dot's Droppings is YourHub.com' peek outside of hyperlocal citizen journalism in the Denver metro area. It is written by YourHub.com staff.


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