It seems that not even hacking is what it used to be any more. Some Google searches, some light reading on the Wikipedia website and anyone can manage to break into somebody else’s e-mail account.

Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Republican Party’s nominee for vice-president of the United States has learned this the hard way, having the password to her Yahoo! account re-set by a college student who goes by the “Rubico” nickname. Consequently, screenshots of Palin’s messages, inbox and address book, along with her e-mail password were posted on the tech discussion website 4chan.org. Moreover, Rubico stated on the same site that it took him only 45 minutes to re-set the governor’s password, using personal info (her birth date and ZIP code) which he found at the drop of a hat on Google and Wikipedia. The piece of information needed to change the password to “popcorn,” as he claims to have done, was a bit harder to find, but background details he found surfing the web gave him the answer to Palin’s security question, “Where did you meet your spouse?”

Currently, both the FBI and the US Secret Service are conducting an investigation into the hack, since the screenshots provided by the hacker(s) also revealed the original web address that they routed through the CTunnel proxy service before attacking the account, which might lead to them being tracked down by investigators.

Two Yahoo! accounts of governor Sarah Palin, gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com, have been deleted, but not before they gave rise to the question of whether the Republican had been using her personal e-mail to conduct state business.