Sarah Palin emails on Wikileaks

The FBI and Secret Service have launched an investigation into a hacking attack on US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo account.

Screen shots of the Alaska Governor's email account were published on Wikileaks, a whistle-blowing website.

Ms Palin's campaign team confirmed that her gov.palin@yahoo.com account was breached. "This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law," said Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain.

"The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them," he added.

A group known as Anonymous claims responsibility. It sent the information to Wikileaks. At the time of writing Web User could not access the Wikileaks site.

"Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws," Wikileaks wrote in a note accompanying the material. "The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism."

One of the emails published in Wikileaks appeared to be from Alaska Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, complaining to Palin about a radio interviewer.

"Arghhh! He is so inconsistent and purposefully misleading," Palin apparently writes in response.

It has been reported that the hack originated from a proxy server called CTunnel.com which is run by Gabriel Ramuglia a 25-year-old webmaster. The hacker or hackers reportedly used this service to gain access to Ms Palin's account.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, commented: "In my view, if Sarah Palin did use her Yahoo address for official government business that was pretty silly of her. But in this case she has been the victim of a crime."

"Yes, there may be interest in what she has been doing in her “private” email account but that is no excuse for breaching security and breaking the law. Anyone who has an interest in the law being upheld should disapprove of these hackers’ activities, regardless of their own political leanings. No-one deserves to have their email account illegally hacked."

www.wikileaks.org