A LOOSELY-ORGANISED group of online hackers has found its latest target - US vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
The 44-year-old Alaskan governor's personal Yahoo e-mail address was hacked on Wednesday by the online pranksters, who are well-known in cyberspace by their group name, Anonymous.
The hackers posted several screenshots of Yahoo e-mail messages, Mrs Palin's contact list and some family photos to Wikileaks.com, a website which hosts leaked government documents.
The screenshots showed Mrs Palin may have used her Yahoo e-mail account for official business as Alaska's governor.
According to US law, all e-mails relating to official government business must be archived and not destroyed. Personal e-mails can be deleted.
It is unknown if Mrs Palin archived the e-mails she sent and received with her Yahoo account.
The McCain campaign reacted strongly to the hacking, saying in a statement: 'This is a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law.
'The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.'
The hacked account, along with another of Mrs Palin's personal e-mail accounts, have since been deleted.
The other account had been investigated by authorities after Mrs Palin dismissed Walt Monegan, the Alaskan public safety commissioner.
One of the leaked e-mails was sent to Mrs Palin from Amy McCorkell, who was earlier appointed by Mrs Palin to an advisory board on alcohol and drug abuse.
In the e-mail, Ms McCorkell wrote that she was praying for Mrs Palin.
'Don't let the negative press get you down,' the e-mail read.
The photographs leaked from Mrs Palin's e-mail accounts were mainly of the Palin family. Among them was a picture of Mrs Palin's daughter, Bristol, holding her younger brother Trig.
One of the screen shots showed Mrs Palin had 84 unread e-mails in her inbox, but the contents of the individual e-mail messages were not posted.The list of e-mail messages included several from Mrs Palin's chief of staff Mike Nizich labelled 'FW: Confidential Ethics Matter' and 'RE: Request for Information and Documents.'
In a blog entry about the hacking incident, Mr Graham Cluey, senior technology consultant of IT security and control firm Sophos, said interest in Mrs Palin's private e-mail account was no excuse for breaching security and breaking the law.
'It's the job of the authorities to investigate if they believe any offence has been committed, not net vigilantes,' he wrote.
'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 e-mail account illegally hacked.'
Precautions
Online security expert Aloysius Cheang told The New Paper that there are precautions that users of web-based e-mail programs like Yahoo and Gmail can take to prevent their accounts from being hacked.
He said: 'Users should change their passwords regularly, and make sure their passwords contain a combination of numbers and letters.
'They should also try not to log into the e-mail accounts on shared computers, or computers they aren't familiar with.'
He added that it is especially risky to log into web-based e-mail accounts on public computer terminals, such as those provided for passengers in transit at airports.
'These computers may have been installed with malicious software which log passwords, then send them to the hacker,' he said.
This article first appeared in the The New Paper on 19 September, 2008.
