Sarah Palin’s email hacker sentenced to 366 days in custody

The student who broke into Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account, as she was running her campaign to become the US Vice President, has been sentenced to a year and one day in custody.

In September 2008, David C Kernell, who went by the internet handle of “Rubico”, posted examples of Palin’s private emails, addresses of her contacts, and family photos on Wikileaks, and bragged that hacking into the vice-presidential candidate’s Yahoo account was child’s play.

Sarah Palin left her Yahoo account vulnerable to attack because she choose to make her “secret questions” her date of birth, her postal code, and information about where she met her husband – all information which David Kernell was able to glean quickly by using Google and Wikipedia.

Palin went on to claim that the email hack paralysed her campaign to become the USA’s first female vice president…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter, Mastodon, or Threads to read more of the exclusive content we post.

Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity 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 analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.