The Misadventures of the Palin Hacker

I gotta say, if I’m going to do some shady business in the net, I would never hang around a message board to boast about it without taking measures to ensure virtual anonymity.

Not so for the boy genius who is claiming to be the hacker who obtained access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail last week. He has posted a supposed first-person account of the hack, revealing the relatively simple steps he says he took to crack the private e-mail of the Republican vice-presidential candidate.

As detailed in his posts at the 4chan forum, 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.

The simplicity of the attack, of course, makes it no less illegal.

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.

The hacker said that he read all of the e-mails in the Palin account and found "nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped. All I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. and pictures of her family. Yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was f*cked."

F*cked indeed. Bloggers of the forum were able to connect his handle to an e-mail address, and tentatively identified the owner as a college student whose father is a Democratic state representative in Tennessee. What’s this, a democrat spawn looking for dirt on Palin? Hmmmm... I sense a conspiracy in the offing.

Pity the boy who thought he could do such a blatantly wrong and illegal act and get away with it scot-free. I can only imagine the raging furor this fiasco would have caused if he unearthed some potentially career-ending information on the Alaskan Governor. I’m betting this hacker wannabe thought of cracking Palin’s e-mail but seriously doubted he could do it. So when he easily got through, he was so proud of himself that he wanted the whole world to know that he did the coolest thing ever! Sadly, such an illegal act is without repercussion to him and maybe his father to a certain extent. This whole snafu just goes to show that one must avoid to do illegal things and if it can’t be avoided, keep the damn thing to yourself.