14 DAY TRIAL // David C. Kernell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for illegally accessing the e-mail account of the US republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin. The alleged hacker faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Earlier this year, Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin was suspected of hindering governmental communication transparency by using her personal Yahoo! e-mail account to conduct official business instead of a government-issued one. These accusations would have been hard to prove, but after her e-mail address transpired in the media, someone broke into the account on Sept. 16 and posted screen shots of its content on the web.
The screen shots posted on Wikileaks caught the attention of a person who notified Palin's staff of the security breach. The Yahoo! account was closed and an official investigation was expected. However, the Internet community moved faster than the authorities, users quickly pointing out that the screen shots and story originated on the /b/ board of the 4chan website. Someone also included a copy of a previously deleted self-confession signed by a user calling himself rubico.
Rubico detailed the methods that he allegedly used to get into the account. According to him, he used the Yahoo! password reset form and got the necessary information like birthday, zip code and the security question answer by doing research on Google and Wikipedia. One of rubico's mistakes was to include his e-mail address in the post. The address was quickly linked by people in the blogosphere to David C. Kernell, son of Democratic Tennessee State Representative Mike Kernell.
At the same time, Gabriel Ramuglia, owner of the Ctunnel proxy service which was used by the hacker, pointed out another mistake made by the hacker. The screen shots released included the uncovered address bar of the browser, which revealed the unique character string in the Ctunnel URL when the hacker accessed the e-mail. Thus, Ramuglia claimed that he could trace the URL in his logs in order to find out the real IP address of the intruder.
The FBI later contacted both Yahoo! and Ramuglia and asked for the logs and with the evidence gathered, they executed a search warrant on Kernell's apartment located in The Commons student housing complex in Knoxville. According to an eye witness, the FBI agents crashed a party and spent two hours searching the apartment and taking pictures. Kernell is said to have fled the scene, but three of his roommates were subpoenaed to testify in court.
The indictment matches the story allegedly posted by rubico on 4chan to a great extent and the trial is scheduled for December 16. Meanwhile, David Kernel has been released without posting bail, but he is forbidden from accessing the Internet, except for e-mail and school work. The hacking incident did not reveal anything incriminating about Palin. "What I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, 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,” wrote rubico.