Sarah Palin hacker suspect had spyware-infected PC

The 21-year-old student accused of hacking into Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was working on a spyware-infected computer, according to his legal team.

David Kernell was mid-way through a student party in September 2008, when the FBI swooped on his apartment in the city of Knoxville, Tennessee. The son of state democratic representative Mike Kernell, and student at the University of Tennessee, had been identified on the internet as being linked to a hack on Sarah Palin’s [email protected] email account, which saw examples of her emails, addresses of her contacts, and family photos posted on Wikileaks.

Sarah Palin recently claimed that the hack disrupted the ultimately unsuccessful Republican Presidential campaign.

Now it is…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.