By- Suzie-Q @ 4:30 PM MST
This screenshot from Gawked.com shows an email account of Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008. Hackers broke into the Yahoo! e-mail account that Palin used for official business as Alaska's governor, revealing as evidence a few inconsequential personal messages she has received since John McCain selected her as his running mate. (AP Photo)
Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account hijacked, e-mails posted online
September 17th, 2008
On the heels of media reports that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was using a private Yahoo e-mail account (gov.palin@yahoo.com) to conduct Alaska state business, hackers have broken into the account and posted evidence of the hijack on Wikileaks.
An activist group calling itself ‘anonymous’ claimed responsibility for the compromise and released screenshots, photographs and the e-mail addresses of several people close to Palin, including her husband Todd and assistant Ivy Frye.
Here’s the announcement from Wikileaks:
Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST)
Wikileaks’ sources loosely affiliated with the activist group
‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential
candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com.
Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email
accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive
made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox,
example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of
correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce
the criticism.
The list of e-mails include an exchange with Alaskan Lieutenant
Governor Sean Parnell about his campaign for Congress and an e-mail
from Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory
Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in 2007.
Wired’s Threat Level reports that McMcCorkell confirmed that she did send the e-mail to Palin.
Following the release of this story, both Sarah Palin’s better known account gov.sarah@yahoo.com and the gov.palin@yahoo.com account have been suspended or deleted as revealed by a test email sent to these addresses by Wikileaks. Although the reasons for the deletion of both accounts can not not yet be established, one interpretation is that Palin is trying to destroy her email records.
Wikileaks said it may release additional e-mails should they prove be of political substance.
Here’s one screenshot of an e-mail released by the group.
* Hat tip: Chris Wysopal, Veracode. Image via CBS News.
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It sounds like the hackers got the emails before she could destroy them?
Run evildoers… run… run fast…
LMAO
These stories from the AP and Political Ticker:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iem-vu_mlRjRYfqkscEkw2ciRm7wD938OLM81
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/17/mccain-camp-seeks-investigation-over-reported-e-mail-hack/
Of course, she’s not the first celebrity to have had her email hacked.
The story has some amusing with a certain Ms Paris Hilton’s experiences back in 2005. Check out the video I made exploring this here:
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2008/09/18/paris-hilton-sarah-palin-video/
Seems to me that if Palin or her surrogates destroy those emails that they might run afoul of the appeal filed last week by Attorney Mitchell on behalf of Andree McLeod. All of those emails on the yahoo accounts should have been included with the documents released or listed pursuant to McLeod’s request for records on June 17, 2008. see Mitchell letter at end of 1st paragraph on page 8.
Amazingly, it’s not the first time that she’s come under scrutiny for improperly using email accounts. See the Frontiersman article from 2004.
Poor McCain. All this dirt that his vetting team failed to discover is bound to give him a heart attack or cause a stroke. Which would put Saint Sarah right into the Oval Office. Is this nation ready to have her as its leader? She is making Richard Nixon look like a choirboy.
Oh come now – in all honesty, a few people have probably saved these jpegs to their desktop?