Comments on: Palin’s Yahoo Account Gets Hacked

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:48:56 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:20:43 +0000

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.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:44:38 +0000

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.