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Palin Email Account Hackers’ Carelessness Could Lead to Capture

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 6:04PM EST
BGR

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Oops. You would think that the group of hackers who recently dug into one of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email accounts was smart enough to cover its trail. Unfortunately for them, it looks like you would be wrong. By now you must have read the hacker group known as Anonymous recently found its way into one of Palin’s email accounts and released a variety of screen shots, family photos and Palin’s entire contact list. As it turns out, Anonymous may have shot itself in the foot in the process. A quick glance at the screen shot above reveals that the hackers included a large portion of the proxy URL along the bottom. While this means nothing to most people, it will likely mean game over for Anonymous or at least one of the team members. The hackers used the proxy service Ctunnel.com to mask their IP from anyone who might try to explore Yahoo logs. By displaying most of the proxy URL in the screen shots it published however, Anonymous left themselves wide open to Ctunnel.com owner Gabriel Ramuglia who will likely be called upon to assist in the investigation (in fact he has probably already been contacted).

Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it’s Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that. Since they were dumb enough to post a full screen shot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log.

Unless Anonymous pulled this stunt off from a coffee shop, or from McDonald’s using a Zune, at least one of the team members could be in a world of hurt pretty soon.

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Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 10 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.