As someone who has personally "hacked" thousands of yahoo IDs and still has a few hundred I can tell you from personal experience that it really isn't hacking in the classical sense. There is actually a regular subculture of folks who troll yahoo looking for IDs to collect and he probably got the idea from someone who does it on a regular basis.
Without making this overly long, there are yahoo ids that are collected and traded called "rares" because they are ids that can no longer be made. When yahoo first started you could make IDs using capital letters, multiple underscores, punctuation and even ASCII codes. In order to make themselves look bigger than they really are Yahoo never deleted these ids when people abandoned them so untold millions of these dormant ids are sitting out there waiting to be found. Software has existed for years that allows you to take a list of ids and passwords, log into yahoo, try for a match and, if you find a match, log the id and password so you could come in later and retrieve it. The method that was used on the palin account was called "infoing it back". That is where you have to guess the zipcode, birthday and the answer to a secret question. This has been going on for years. I got tired of collecting ids a few years ago but there is no doubt that collecting goes on today.
The really interesting question will be finding out how he got her specific ID to begin with. There is no doubt he was targeting her account while regular ID collecting is more random. That could be where the real scandal unfolds.
Is this an admission you really want to make?
Since I’m someone who did have a yahoo email account “hacked” or whatever the computer term is, wish I knew you before it happened :) You probably could have given me tips to avoid that nightmare.
The really interesting question will be finding out how he got her specific ID to begin with
I couldn't agree more with you. This very "little" point is of very significant interest to me. I wanna know the connections of the "how".