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- THE
- INCIDENT
- WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR:
- - Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah
- Palin's Yahoo e-mail account.
- - Sarah Palin used the e-mail address gov.sarah@yahoo.com for public
- communication. Several media outlets have confirmed this fact prior to
- this "incident". SOURCE:
- http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/10/palin-email-privilege/ SOURCE:
- http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/09/15-7
- - The e-mail address that the poster hacked was gov.palin@yahoo.com.
- This second e-mail address, previously unknown publicly, was used for
- private communcations.
- - Yahoo e-mail addresses, unlike .gov e-mail addresses, are not subject
- to archiving and oversight. This fact has led to controversy from
- several sources, including fellow Republicans, asking her to release
- e-mails from her Yahoo account.
- - The anonymous poster apparently panicked, and released the password
- onto /b/.
- - Several other posters on /b/ took screenshots of the Inbox and
- various e-mails.
- - Some of the screenshots reference several people in Alaska state
- government. One of these people is Sean Parnell, Lieutenant Governor of
- Alaska. Parnell mentions KFQD Radio's Dan Fagan, to whom he gave an
- interview about Palin's ACES initiative. Lt. Gov. Parnell's e-mail
- address is verified via an Alaska Republican Central Committee contact
- listing. SOURCE: http://gov.state.ak.us/aces/ SOURCE:
- http://www.alaskarepublicans.com/centralcommittee.aspx
- - One of the screenshots references the Yahoo account fek9wnr, Todd
- Palin, Sarah's husband who is at the heart of the controversy over her
- use of Yahoo e-mail for public dealings. The fek9wnr account was
- verified as being Todd Palin via a public posting to an automotive
- enthusiast BBS from August 2006. SOURCE:
- http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/centurionconversions/message/2309
- - Several photographs of her family were allegedly downloaded from the
- e-mail account.
- - A scan of profiles.yahoo.com put gov.palin@yahoo.com's profile update
- date at 04/05/2008, long before any VP nod was apparent. If this were a
- fake, the perpetrator would've had to travel into the past and create
- an account or be very good at guessing who the VP candidate would be 5+
- months later, not to mention faking an overwhelming amount of e-mails,
- photographs, verified private cellphone numbers, and other information.
- - A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password account with
- the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as
- "white knighting". This locked everyone else out of the account. The
- "white knight" posted a screenshot to /b/ of his pending message to one
- of Palin's contacts about how to recover the account, but made the
- critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set.
- - Several other people in the /b/ thread then apparently logged in
- using this new password, and they all attempted to reset the password
- at once, causing a security trap at Yahoo to automatically put a
- 24-hour lockout on the account.
- THE AFTERMATH:
- - Sarah Palin was likely notified of the breach by morning, as she had
- then deleted both the gov.sarah@yahoo.com address (the one subject to
- the disclosure controversy in the media) as well as the
- gov.palin@yahoo.com address (the one that was hacked).
- - The outright deletion of the accounts can be verified by attempting
- to pull up the public profile on both addresses, which both existed
- during the incident. SOURCE: http://profiles.yahoo.com/gov.palin
- SOURCE: http://profiles.yahoo.com/gov.sarah
- - Both accounts were deleted simultaneously, thus linking the
- publicly-known e-mail address "gov.sarah" and the private e-mail
- address "gov.palin".
- - This outright deletion may have the potential to be viewed as
- destruction of evidence, considering that the e-mails in the
- now-deleted accounts are the subject of several legal controversies.
- SOURCE:
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090303210_pf.html
- - Several ZIP, RAR, and 7Z compilations of the downloaded screenshots,
- contacts, and photos were made available by anonymous individuals.
- - 4chan is actively (some say over-actively) banning and deleting any
- posts of the screenshots of Palin's account, contacts, or family
- photos.
- - An anonymous poster to 420chan, using information from the e-mail
- account's contact list, attempted to call Bristol Palin's cellphone
- number using the AT&T phone relay service. Several others allegedly
- called the cellphone number itself and got Bristol's voicemail. These
- posts were quickly deleted by 420chan moderators.
- - A poster on /b/ did a lookup on the cellphone number which returned
- this information: Type: Cell Phone Provider: Dobson Cellular Systems
- Location: Palmer, AK
- - An anonymous individual has uploaded some of the screenshots to a
- photobucket account. SOURCE:
- http://s405.photobucket.com/albums/pp134/anoncrack/
- - A poster in /r9k/ e-mailed the compilations to ABC News producer
- Eamon McNiff who he/she claims is a personal contact of his/hers.
- - Someone submitted a summary to Digg. As of this writing it has only
- 12 diggs. SOURCE:
- http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_Incident_Did_4Chan_Anon_Hack_Palin_s_Yahoo_Email
- - As of right now the media related to the incident sits mostly
- confined to 4chan and rapidshare, and thus either deleted, censored or
- under the radar.
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