“Yesterday, the Department received a referral alleging that the personal e-mail accounts of Gov. Sarah Palin, her staff, and her family had been unlawfully hacked. The Department is reviewing the matter,” Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney told Jana Winter of FOX today.
The hacker who compromised Palin’s account used Ctunnel.com, an Internet proxy site, which renders Web users anonymous, to get into Palin’s e-mail. The site is run by Gabriel Ramuglia, 25, a Web developer from Athens, Ga., who said the hacker left behind revealing clues after posting screen grabs of Palin’s inbox. Ramuglia said he saw the screenshots and recognized his site. He is now working with the FBI to provide agents with his business logs to help identify the criminal.
“I should be able to find out who is involved by going through my logs,” he said. “The FBI called me last night and they wanted to know that the logs weren’t deleted — as long as they weren’t deleted — and they asked me to help, so I’m downloading them.”
There was also continuing speculation as to exactly who was responsible for the attack.
Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks Inc., said he knows “through personal contacts” that members of the group Anonymous were involved in the Palin e-mail attack.
He said Anonymous is a loose network of a few dozen people who live in the United States and abroad and range from teenagers to 30-year-olds who share what he said is a “sociopathic sense of humor.”
“Anonymous sort of takes pride in doing this publicly and pissing people off. There are other groups that do this, but they aren’t as public about it,” Nazario said.
Also circulating the Internet is an online confession signed with an e-mail address belonging to David Kernell, 20, from Memphis, Tenn. Kernell, a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and described on various Web sites as a fan of chess and online gaming, is the son of Democratic state representative Mike Kernell.
Mike Kernell told FOX News that he wasn’t aware of any investigation of his son.
The confession read: “i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story.” It continued to say that what started as a prank was cut short because of panic over the possibility the FBI might investigate, the hacker wrote.
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