Posted on 09/17/2008 9:42:56 PM PDT by Kaslin
Left-wing internet hackers have been credited for illegally breaking into GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palins email.
Members of what has been described as the cyber vigilante group Anonymous broke into Palins personal Yahoo email account and uploaded stolen information to the Internet. Gawker.com, a highly trafficked gossip site, took five screenshots of the stolen cache and promoted it on their site.
The screenshots included two full emails and Palins inbox list. In one email Palin was critical of a talk radio host who was giving her Lt. Governor, who is currently running against Don Young for Congress, a hard time over tax issues. In the other, a woman who Palin named to the states drug and alcohol advisory board sent prayers to Palin and told her not to let the negative press wear you down."
Personal family information was obtained as well. A photo of baby Trig Palin was found in the email cache, uploaded from daughter Bristol Palin's cell phone and sent to her mother's email account. Bloggers at Gawker lifted Bristols cellphone number from the emails and called it to confirm it was hers. They recorded audio of Bristols voicemail and promoted it on their site. Gawker bloggers also reprinted Palin's husband Todd's and son Track's personal email addresses.
Left-wing operatives have been seeking Palins personal emails in relation to the Troopergate controversy, in which Palins foes believed she abused her power as Alaskan Governor to fire one of her political appointees. Palin recently released official email communication, but has refused to make her private emails publicly available to the chagrin of those seeking to bring her down in the inquiry.
Nothing in the emails appears to be politically damaging to Palin.
McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis issued a statement calling the email hackery a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. He expressed hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them.
Federal law strictly prohibits anyone from accessing email without proper authorization, but is unclear how those would be treated who make those emails publicly available.
Gawker knows full well the information was illegally obtained and stands by their blog posts. Here are the screenshots of the emails saved before the account went dark, along with the contact list. Its newsworthy and we will not be taking it down! the site said.
More coverage of this story on the Townhall Blog.
I sure hope we get to see some moonbats go to prison in the near future. Maybe they’ll do us a favor and put them in the same cell with Ben Dover.
Bwaha. DUmmie catastrophe of the century.
Stealing baby pictures and harassing a 17 year old girl’s cellphone is the best they could do.
Pff, for all anybody knows, it could be an insider at Yahoo. Funny thing is, if they did find anything potentially incriminating, they most likely rendered it completely inadmissible as evidence. Any decent attorney could, and should, claim the material was planted there by the hackers.
But this all does bring up a good point. Folks probably don’t know just how left-of-left-of-left many tech businesses are. If Google had their way, they’d be China. You think Yahoo would be any different? Ha. I bet if you look at the top 100 on Obama’s donor list, and take out Liberal Hollywooders, you’d have a pretty good sampling of the top tech companies.
You forgot the rule: any of Amanda Carpenter’s writings must be accompanied by her photo.
I used to troll the chans a long time ago, there’s no proof the person who did this was left-wing... it was probably a high school or college kid that got bored... it’s more like clockwork orange than brownshirting...
This is just over the top. These losers need to go to jail.
The stuff's still up there on their site, so I guess nobody really cares. Sad.
Anyone with information on those folks can contact Secret Service by phone at the nearest local field office. Try: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/field_offices.shtml
Is there any such thing as conservative “right wing” hackers? I wish there were. I wish the left and it’s lying minons were being exposed everyday on the net and in the media.
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/18/palin_email_investigation/
Not quite Anonymous
Posted in Security, 18th September 2008 01:22Â GMT
Memo to law enforcement investigators tracking down who broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account: Gabriel Ramuglia might be a good place to start.
The 25-year-old webmaster and entrepreneur is the operator of Ctunnel.com (http://ctunnel.com/), the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate's personal email account and exposed its contents (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/17/anonymous_hacks_sarah_palin/) to the world. While he has yet to examine his logs, he says there's a good chance they will lead to those responsible, thanks to some carelessness on their part.
"Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it's Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that," he told El Reg in a phone interview. "Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log."
Ramuglia got into the proxy business a few years ago, after schools began blocking access to an online game site he used to co-own. Pretty soon, people began using the proxy service to access YouTube, Gmail, MySpace, and dozens of other sites that are routinely blocked by IT departments.
To prevent abuse of the service - such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that's been known to happen - Ramuglia logs each user's IP address, along with the time and web destination. That often isn't enough to track down people who access extremely popular websites. But in this case, the perpetrators included a whole string of random-looking characters when posting screenshots of Palin's hacked account. That will probably be enough for him to pinpoint the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The information at the moment is on a server at a Chicago colocation site owned by FDC Servers (http://www.fdcservers.net/). Logs are automatically flushed after seven days, so the clock is ticking for law enforcement, who presumably are under intense pressure to protect the privacy of a candidate for the White House. Of course, there's always the possibility that Ctunnel.com was only one of multiple anonymization services the email hackers used to cover their tracks, but there's only one way to find out.
Ramuglia said if he is contacted by law enforcement officials he will probably give them the information they seek. At time of writing, he's received no inquiries from any law enforcement agencies, he said.
The breach of Palin's account "is pretty clearly against my terms of service," he said. "As exciting as it is to be in the news, this is not the type of activity I can encourage by any means." ®
Trafficking in stolen information. They have to know who posted that information, so that would also be conspiracy after the fact.
Sound to me that there should be a criminal investigation of these leftist thugs.
Mark
“I used to troll “
Naw.... really?
That must be a new rule, but I will try to remebber the next time
A little snip from a post by the hacker.
Found on michellemalkin.com
“I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING, I read everything, every little blackberry confirmation all the pictures, and there was nothing”
It is impossible to “bust” Anonymous. Anonymous is an avatar of the collective Internet, a faceless manifestation of Chaos, not some group with a clubhouse and secret handshake. These “hackers” are just script kiddies from /b/ doing it for the lulz.
Most /b/tards aren’t old enough to vote, and couldn’t care less about politics anyway. They just enjoy effing stuff up for the fun of it. You should see what they did to Habbo Hotel and the Scientologists...
It appears that the individual responsible did a very poor job concealing his identity. A few google searches reveal enough information that I’m sure this guy is getting phone calls about this as we speak...er, type.
“Is there any such thing as conservative right wing hackers? I wish there were. I wish the left and its lying minons were being exposed everyday on the net and in the media.”
There is evidence of a left winger but moderators are keeping his name from being posted until it is nailed down a little better.
They said the single hacker will be easy to track because he posted screen caps with his info. This guy is in deep trouble.
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