The trial of David Kernell who is accused of “hacking” ex-VP candidate and MILF Sarah Palin has been delayed until next May. The trial was originally slated to start on December 16, but due to the need to to carry out computer forensics analysis that are relevant to the case.
Perhaps this will give his father who is Tennessee Democrat legislator Mike Kernell time to bail his ass out of trouble come to an agreement that makes everybody happy.
A judge in Alaska has ruled that Republican V.P. Candidate and MILF Sarah Palin must save the e-mails in her Yahoo accounts. These would be the same Yahoo accounts that were recently hacked and the contents posted online:
Superior Court Judge Craig Stowers on Friday also ordered Alaska’s attorney general to recover messages from a Yahoo.com account of Palin’s that was breached by hackers last month. That break-in prompted Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign to order closed at least one additional private account Palin maintained.
The judge issued the orders at the request of Andree McLeod, an Anchorage activist whose pursuit of Palin’s e-mails revealed that the governor did considerable state business from a Yahoo e-mail address — an arrangement that avoided the safeguards and accountability of the state’s secure e-mail system.
Well that sucks if you’re Palin. And I’m sure that the Republicans didn’t need this news at this precise moment seeing as Obama is widening his lead on McCain.
Finally, someone sees that what Palin did with these Yahoo e-mail addresses was less than legal at best and steps need to be taken to protect the public record. One has to wonder if she’s doing stuff like this as Governor, what would she do as vice president.
Perhaps Ms. Palin would care to answer that. I’m sure Americans would like to know.
David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student and son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell is being indicted on charged that he “hacked” V.P. Candidate and MILF Sarah Palin’s Yahoo E-Mail. I say “hacked” because this was really not a hack but a social engineering exercise that showed that anybody could have done this. If convicted Kernell faces a maximum of five years in prison, along with a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release.
It should be noted that Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws, and these are the same e-mail accounts that have been “hacked.” I’m not trying to be political, but one has to wonder why nobody is chasing that aspect of the story.
Anyone care to comment on that?
A grand jury in Chattanooga, Tenn. has ended its meeting on Tuesday without indicting a Tennessee lawmaker’s son for “hacking” V.P. candidate and MILF Sarah Palin’s e-mail. For now, he and his father are hiding away from the media at a hotel and it is not clear what will happen next. But I would think that the investigation continues.
This isn’t the sort of reaction that I expected. I was thinking that law enforcement and the republicans would make an example of him to divert America’s attention away from the real issues of the day. Perhaps it still may happen. We’ll have to see. Right now, it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of interest in doing much of anything to him.
This just keeps getting better and better.
The FBI searched the home of 20-year-old University of Tennessee student David Kernell looking for evidence relating to the Sarah Palin e-mail “hack.” Here’s where it gets weird. Kernell is the son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell. So you can fully expect the Republicans to ratchet up the rhetoric about the e-mail “hack” being part of some Democratic plot to discredit Sarah Palin. It may also bring both Kernell’s life and his father’s political career to a screeching halt.
Whatever.
Assuming they can pin this him (as no charges have been filed…..yet), Wired has an article on what he might be facing in terms of punishment.
Okay. Here’s the deal. Sarah Palin’s e-mail wasn’t hacked by some uber brillant hacker. It was hacked by some dude who managed to figure out how to get in to her e-mail after a few seconds of using Google. So he’s hardly a criminal mastermind by any stretch of the imagination.
According to Wired’s Threat Level blog, the perp who goes by the handle “Rubico” talked about what he did on 4chan:
“As detailed in the postings, the Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse — the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.”
This is called social engineering. Basically, “Rubico” counted on the fact that Palin would use easy to remember information to set up and secure her e-mail, and leveraged that to get into it. I guess that should make one should wonder if a VP candidate and MILF can’t secure her e-mail, how can she secure the country?
But I digress.
“Rubico” days as a free person may be numbered. He apparently didn’t cover his tracks well:
“Once the hacker had read the e-mails in Palin’s account, he said he suddenly realized what he’d done and how vulnerable he was to being caught, since he’d used only a single proxy service to hide his IP address.”
Too bad he was that sloppy. Because the FBI has been in touch with the proxy service he used:
“Gabriel Ramuglia who operates Ctunnel, the internet anonymizing service the hacker used to post the information from Palin’s account to the 4chan forum, told Threat Level this morning that the FBI had contacted him yesterday to obtain his traffic logs. Ramuglia said he had about 80 gigabytes of logs to process and hadn’t yet looked for the information the FBI was seeking but planned to be in touch with the agents today.
Ramuglia said the screenshots of Palin’s e-mail account, which the hacker posted online, will help him narrow his search, since they revealed most of the Ctunnel URL that was at the top of the hacker’s browser when he took the screen shot.”
Translation: “Rubico” has just had his 15 minutes of fame which will shortly turn into 15 years in the pen as his cell mates bitch.
In the meantime, here’s what you can learn from this: Use obscure information that can’t be tied directly to you if you ever need to answer a password reset question. Ditto for the password itself. Otherwise, you’ll be dumb and owned. Just like Sarah Palin.
Don’t be a Sarah. Be smart. Be secure.
Republican VP Candidate and MILF Sarah Palin has had her private Yahoo e-mail hacked by the activist group “Anonymous” who are best known for their run-ins with Scientology. The contents of the e-mail account were then posted to the Internet via Wikileaks for all to see (if you can, the site is currently Slashdotted). The damage to Palin is huge. Apparently the contents of the e-mail account prove that she used private e-mail to to shield government business from public scrutiny, which from what I hear is illegal.
Sucks to be her.
Here’s the deal. Attacking Scientology is one thing. While I don’t condone that, I’m not losing sleep over it either and neither it seems are the authorities. However, when somebody hacks a VP candidate, the FBI and Secret Service can be fully expected to bring the pain to these individuals…. whomever they might be. If they can pin this on someone, they’re about to get owned.
Having said that, it should be interesting to see how McCain and Palin respond to this very embarrasing leak.
UPDATE: Gawker has posted more info on this including some contents of her e-mail account as well as a selection of her address list. As for McCain and Palin’s response to this, campaign manager Rick Davis said this:
“This is a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment.”
Dude, the genie is out of the bottle. Everybody is going to be poking through these e-mails. You’ve got a major issue on your hands.
Palin E-mail Hacker Sentenced To A Year And A Day
Posted in Commentary with tags Hacked, Sarah Palin on November 14, 2010 by itnerdRemember that college student who hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account and leaked the contents to the universe? He was also found to be the son of a Democrat which caused some embarrassment. He’s been found guilty and sentenced to 366 days in custody. Oh, there’s more than just the sentence than being in custody:
Federal Judge Thomas W. Phillips also said David Kernell, who was a 20-year-old economics major at the University of Tennessee when he deduced the answers to security questions and read emails in Palin’s private account, should get mental-health treatment.
Kernell apologized in court Friday to the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and her family.
I’m not sure how getting mental health treatment works into this, but this puts an end to this saga. Now we will have to get our fix of Palin on Fox News.
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