Today I opened my email and found a story about how Sarah Palin, the Republican VP Nominee, had her email account hacked. Here are some quotes:
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.
Following the release of this story, both Sarah Palin’s better known account gov.sarah@yahoo.com and the gov.palin@yahoo.com account have been suspended or deleted as revealed by a test email sent to these addresses by Wikileaks. Although the reasons for the deletion of both accounts can not not yet be established, one interpretation is that Palin is trying to destroy her email records.
This story is a classic example of people not knowing the dangers of the Internet. People can be clueless as to how they have their stuff compromised. However, in this case, it is extremely dangerous for politicians. People “armed” with access to private materials, and I don’t care which politician it is, can be manipulated. There could be hundreds of emails that are fine, and just one email taken out of context could skew opinions.
The comment that irks me is “Although the reasons for the deletion of both accounts can not not yet be established, one interpretation is that Palin is trying to destroy her email records.” If you’ve know that your email accounts have been compromised, accounts that contain very personal and work related information, wouldn’t you want to prevent people from using it? This “one interpretation” makes it sound like Palin is covering her tracks, where as she might just not want the whole world prying into her life? Give me a break with all this alluding to cover up and conspiracy.
If Barack Obama had his email compromised, I’m sure there would be enough ammunition to attack him and make up stories of corruption. Only time will tell what will be posted about what was contained in her email account. Honestly, I doubt they found anything incriminating or they would have posted it already.
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I’m no Palin hater (or lover), but of course she’s covering her tracks. If she just didn’t want the world prying into her life, she’d change the password to something non-trivial. The only reason to delete is if you think that’ll prevent a probe from getting the data.
Actually, a lot of politicians (especially Presidents/presidential candidates) eliminate all their personal email accounts for this very reason. Bush has stated many times that one thing he’s really looking forward to when he’s no longer President is emailing again. Presidents don’t email, and they shouldn’t email, because it’s just too dangerous. People can hack your account, steal your account, pose as you, etc.
Another entirely plausible scenario is that Yahoo suspended her account when the story broke.
“Covering her tracks” makes it sound like she has something to hide.
By the way, changing your password to something non-trivial isn’t a guarantee either. I personally had a nine-character password hacked for my hotmail account that contained letters and numbers and was not used anywhere else. After they hacked that account, they leveraged it to reset my PayPal account password and tried to run up charges on me. It was a little-used account and they changed my settings to filter the PayPal emails so I didn’t catch it right away. To this day, I still don’t know for sure how they got in to my Hotmail account.
The lesson everyone should learn is, your information is NEVER completely safe in the online world. If you don’t want to risk having your email account hacked…. then don’t have one. Because a determined hacker WILL hack your account.
It should come as no surprise that it’s a conservative candidate who has her email hacked. I bet all the hackers around the world literally love Obama.
Rumor now is that the hacker is the son of a Democratic state senator from Tennessee. Wouldn’t that be interesting. And yet I bet somehow the media (well NBC at least) will find a way to justify softballing the hacking part and sensationalize the fact that Palin was using her Yahoo account for some business emails.
On that note… anyone use Outlook and accidentally send emails from the wrong account? I do it all the time. I haven’t tried setting up my Yahoo account with Outlook though.