Cade Metz reports in The Register about a hacking attempt made upon the personal Yahoo! Mail account of Sarah Palin. The online activist group known as “Anonymous” which previously targeted the Church of Scientology has now turned its sights on Mrs. Palin. The pilfered files are available at WikiLeaks.
Those seeking e-mail encryption tools can find such at the GNU with GNU Privacy Guard. A variety of guides by the NSA in configuring systems securely can be found
Password
I think they just guessed her password. $1 says that it was:
Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, or Trig.
I wouldn’t say it was the name of one of the kids
The best guess out there is that it was done via password guessing. Yahoo!Mail’s password recovery system is also loose enough to where someone with information found in your average borrower record at a library could break in. With a candidate for VP who has had their life openly displayed for the world to say, Yahoo!Mail’s password recovery system is frankly not secure at all.
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Stephen Michael Kellat, Host, LISTen
PGP KeyID: 899C131F
Article at Wired.com
Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/palin-e-mail-ha.html
Frak
Well, I did draft a segment that Blake has for review on this. The segment covers simple ways librarians can mitigate risk of this. Oddly enough, most of the steps are pretty easy but are not the default ways mail clients are set up. Adding in PGP is a little bit more tricky but can be done.
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Stephen Michael Kellat, Host, LISTen
PGP KeyID: 899C131F
Pretty awful
It despicable for someone to do this. Vice Presidential candidate or not this was a personal email account. What a bunch of louses.
and another thing…
Activists my butt. They are crooks and creeps.