Saturday, September 20, 2008

Palin Email "Hack" Was Hardly a Hack at All [P053ur5]

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/396663542/palin-email-hack-was-hardly-a-hack-at-all

The screamingly obvious trail of evidence left behind by the person who broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo mail yesterday should have been the tip-off—this was not an elite job. According to postings on the troll-hive forum 4chan dug up by Threat Level, all the perp did was guess her password-resest security question correctly after a few seconds of Googling.

The question was: Where did you meet your spouse? A fact that is readily available in the now flooded stream of Palin info on the web—they met in high school, and that's all it took to start the shitstorm. The 4chan post also further illustrates that the whole thing was done by someone well over their head:

yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was fucked, I panicked, i still wanted the stuff out there but I didn't know how to rapidshit all that stuff, so I posted the pass on /b/, and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state

Read the complete post over at Wired, and pick up an excellent primer to making sure your email and other online accounts are as secure as possible with this great guide by our friends at Lifehacker. [Threat Level, Lifehacker]