Posted on 09/17/2008 11:15:26 AM PDT by Domandred
Mod note: Do no post any screenshots of Governor Palin's Yahoo account on Free Republic.
Thank you.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.zdnet.com ...
I may have mis-stated that, O’Reilly said that anyone who down loaded and passed on the information is liable.
Look, just imagine if this was FreeRepublic that allowed purloined personal information to remain on the site and be passed on to others. If you think that Jim Robinson would not be held responsible, you’re fooling yourself. They would fight it, but they would, at the very least be tried in the press, their web server would be under attack and at the very least, they would be forced off the ether-net.
What I want to know is, was this web site one of the sites that were vetted by the Obama campaign to cover the Obama nominating convention?
Having worked in the field of information security for some time and having worked on criminal cases involving breeches of security, I'm telling you that it's not going to happen.
They would fight it, but they would, at the very least be tried in the press, their web server would be under attack and at the very least, they would be forced off the ether-net.
Which is itself a crime.
What I want to know is, was this web site one of the sites that were vetted by the Obama campaign to cover the Obama nominating convention?
Not as far as I can tell. There are millions of blogs out there. Only a handful have the kind of following that lend themselves to being noticed by a presidential campaign.
More interesting to me will be Yahoo!s response to all of this. They've had a lot of security problems in the past but nothing that's gotten this kind of press.
How they handle it will indicate whether they are in the tank for 0bama and whether there was help from inside of Yahoo!
Apparently, the hacker is already known.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Details emerged Thursday behind the break-in of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail account, including a first-hand account suggesting it was vulnerable because a hacker was able to impersonate her online to obtain her password.
The hacker guessed that Alaska’s governor had met her husband in high school, and knew Palin’s date of birth and home Zip code. Using those details, the hacker tricked Yahoo Inc.’s service into assigning a new password, “popcorn,” for Palin’s e-mail account, according to a chronology of the crime published on the Web site where the hacking was first revealed.
The FBI and Secret Service launched a formal investigation Wednesday. Yahoo declined to comment Thursday on details of the investigation, citing Palin’s privacy and the sensitivity of such investigations.
The person who claimed responsibility for the break-in did not respond Thursday to an e-mail inquiry from The Associated Press.
State Rep. Mike Kernell, not US Rep...
I wish there was a conservative email provider. Anyone know of any?
I’ll start off by saying that more of what you say seems correct to me than not. However, not everyone is an Internet Security expert. Most of us have WAY too full a plate to deal with to even get 10% of the way into it (Internet Security) that someone like you would likely recommend. Consider: Gov. Palin is probably just an “average” Internet / e-mail user, at most. She sure has plenty to do outside of that! If the Alaska State Gov’t. has an Internet Security person working for the Governor’s Office, then they should have advised Gov. Palin on essential internet secutity protocols.* If that person (if they exist) did not do so, then how does Gov. Palin find out (except perhaps by chance or accident)? It may seem “obvious” to you. It may not be so obvious to most people.
I’m quite sure I can find a bushel basket full of things most people, including yourself, are completely ignorant of, in my area of specialization. Heck, I am an electronics engineer and use computers all the time: I readily recognize there are probably ten bazillion things I SHOULD KNOW but I’ve not yet learned about the Internet, about 9 bazillion of which I have no suspicion about or knowledge of their existence at all. I just don’t have the freakin’ time, and nobody’s told me.
One thing I have learned from this is more about what constitutes a relatively safe “answer” to those “security questions” one often has to try to remember for even mundane accounts. Now... If only I could remember all of ‘em!
*On the other hand, I would also point out, as others have noted here, that Gov. Palin appears to have been only sending personal & unimportant (to the public) e-mails on her Yahoo account. So, the question becomes, should the State of Alaska provide the Governor with a highly secure e-mail account for personal communications?
“Hacker: What’s this? If you send this string of data to this piece of software across the Internet, you can gain access to every file on the server’s hard drive!”
And, uh, just why would you be doing this and how is it that unlike most people, you have the time to do so? Indeed, am I to believe you are unaware of what your “string of data” might be up to?
They are a Cancer. How does one deal with a cancer........?
Exactly.
“Look. Security is expensive.”
Yes, but if penalties appropriate to the damages done were enacted, there’d be a lot less need. (Oh, that’s right though, the need for Internet Security makes you money.)
Sheepish grin. :-)
Other than the little problem sure these hackers can blame Palin. They will have years and years and years in jail to do it.
PS Posting an email you know to have been unlawfully intercepted is a felony. I wonder about the other issues of identify theft and threats to a political candidate under Secret Service protection.
You can bet that I’m only a Dem. so that I can vote in the local races, ie. Sheriff, mayor, county commiss., etc.
The DEM party has been HIGHJACKED and they offer no ideas that are appealing to me and my family. :)
You can condemn the thugs, but would you want the idiot who was reckless with $500,000 cash running your business?
Here’s the deal, the trooper was treated like any other trooper, and he was suspended for a few days.
Because some people do that kind of thing. It doesn't matter why. What matters is that it happens.
It's better that people with no motive to do harm find these things and tell the people that can fix them.
Sadly, the people that can fix them can't seem to figure out that it's better to fix problems than blame people that find the problems.
The problems that get found ALREADY EXIST. It's not like teh ev1l hax0rs MADE the problem. They just found it. Punishing them for that alone is stupid and counterproductive.
If they do something nefarious with it, that's a different story.
The original definition of "hacker" is someone that takes things apart to see how they work. It's been corrupted into being someone that does bad stuff to computers.
There are a lot of people that can't seem to figure out the difference. That's to bad, because the hackers are the ones that make the Internet better by finding out what parts are flawed so that someone can fix them.
If the software that the hackers find flaws in is open source, they often provide the fix to the people that publish the software along with the security problem.
Of course! Why didn't I think of that?
Why don't they make murder a capital crime? Then no one would commit murder!
And those idiots that slash tires and burn down buildings and throw rocks through windows for political purposes? We can just pass laws against those things with a punishment attached and it won't happen any more! While we're at it, let's make bribery illegal! Then we can stop worrying about our public officials taking money and stashing it in their freezers!
Brilliant!
(Do I really have to add a /sarcasm tag?)
So is burglary. Do you still lock your doors when you leave? Or, because there's a law against people robbing your house, do you just leave your door wide open because the law makes you immune from burglary?
I doubt that the locks on my door are pickproof. I am, however, 0% at fault when someone picks my lock to enter my house.
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