Ah yes, its a beautiful thing when politics and technology come together, Obama uses twitter and text messaging to announce his running mate direct to the public, John McCain not knowing how to use e-mail and now the newest player in the U.S. elections, the first ever ViLF as some forum posters like to refer to her, is getting into the tech world. But, as most of us know as good as the internet is for us, it can also do some pretty bad things. Just recently Palin came under fire for using a Yahoo! e-mail to conduct government business, critics allege that she uses the account to get around public records laws, as the Bush administration has also been charged with doing. and sure enough just a couple of days when the news hit the fans, her account got hacked. The hacker got access to Palin’s account last Tuesday and posted screenshots and emails in wikileaks. The e-mail addresses have since been deleted.
At first it was believed that this was a professional job, that a group of 1337 hackers target the VP candidate’s e-mail. However, recent reports and further analysis of the screenshots show that the hacker could’ve done a better job to cover his trails. The hacker used a proxy service, which is the right thing to do, called Ctunnel.com to hide his IP address, this is all well and good but the hacker forgot to remove his browser’s address bar when he posted the screenshots on the internet this would make it a lot easier for officials to check the logs and track his as* down.
And now a few days later someone that claims to be the hacker has surfaced saying that the hack was quite easy to do. The hacker simply reset her password by using her birthday, ZIP code and some info on where she met her spouse, which the hacker pretty much found with simple web searches. After the hacker posted the screenshots online other people tried to help by logging on to Palin’s e-mail address and resetting her password.
