It didn't take long for federal authorities to catch up with the hacker who found his way into Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's email account. A 20-year-old Tennessee man was indicted this week on a single charge of accessing a protected computer. The indictment against David Kernell, the son of a Democratic state representative from Memphis, carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The indictment alleges Kernell gained access to Palin's Yahoo email account on or about Sept. 16. The next day, Wikileaks.org published several screen shots of Yahoo email messages, email addresses of Palin family members and associates, and other data from Palin's private account. Bloggers quickly cited Kernell as a suspect after linking him to the online name "rubico," used by the hacker who claimed to have broken into Palin's account. Rubico claimed to have accessed the account by using Yahoo's password reset feature and answering security questions with publicly available information.
For more on this breach:
- check out this CIO.com article [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.cio.com/article/453577/US_Man_Indicted_for_Hacking_Palin_s_E_Mail_Account?source=home_ln