Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Got Yahoo? Don’t be surprised if you boo-hoo. Although it’s probably just as easy for any email account. Feeling a little creeped out yet? Read on…and then start deleting like mad…

The Swamp:

How was Sarah Palin’s e-mail hacked?

The hacker posed as Palin.

After Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail address was posted online, the self-identified hacker has reported anonymously at a Web-site where the fruits of his Palin hacking first appeared, he logged on as the Alaska governor and reset her password.

He used her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her husband — the security question on her Yahoo! account: The answer, Wasilla High, came from a Google search.

The Wired blog network’s Threat Level reports of the hacker whose handle, Rubico, has been tracked to an e-mail address that tentatively identifies him as a Tennesee college student.

A Democratic state representative in Tennesee, no less, identifying himself as the student’s father, told Threat Level he could not talk about the matter.

Because, as Threat Level notes, “the simplicity of the attack… makes it no less illegal.”

The hacker had said that he read all of Palin’s stored e-mail 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.”

The FBI and Secret Service have opened an investigation Wednesday. Yahoo! Has declined comment on a security matter, and the McCain-Palin campaign has denounced the act as an invastion of Palin’s privacy.

The break-in of Palin’s private account is especially significant because Palin sometimes uses non-government e-mail to conduct state business, the Associated Press notes. Previously disclosed e-mails indicate her administration embraced Yahoo! accounts as an alternative to government e-mail, which could possibly be released to the public under Alaska’s Open Records Act.

Details of the break-in, if authentic, are consistent with speculation by computer security experts who said Yahoo’s “forgot-my-password” service almost certainly was exploited.

The mechanism allows customers to retrieve or change their password if they can verify their identity by confirming personal information such as birthdate, zip code and the answer to a “secret question,” such as a childhood pet’s name or school mascot. Palin’s hacker was challenged to guess where Alaska’s governor met her husband, Todd. Palin herself had recounted in her speech at the Republican National Convention that the pair began dating two decades ago in high school in Wasilla, a town near Anchorage.

“I found out later though (sic) more research that they met at high school,” the hacker wrote, “so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on ‘Wasilla high’”