and the Script Kiddie Is… David Kernell
Every one has heard about Palin’s email getting hacked. Well, whats all over the news right now is who the script kiddie might be. Turns out that the handle of the poster has been linked to the 20-year-old son of Tennessee Democrat Mike Kernell. How interesting. Now, this is all speculation but if it was him I wonder if he used his scriptoicious leetness was used to “do something awesome” or whether it was instigated. What I do want to see is justice, if the claims are true: he hacked an e-mail account for malicious intent, published private content of another individual and generally caused mischief. I mean, think of the man hours that were lost because of people looking at wikileaks.org. What a hit to the economy.
I was watching the seclists.org mailing list while this was going on and thought it was funny that they were dissecting it before the proxy owner even said they were going to cooperate.
Now, even though David Kernell may have “hacked” yahoo’s password reset feature, do you really think that it was a hack? I mean, kids in high school and college do this all the time to their friends. I bet her password recovery question was easily guessable.
What I find really funny about this got caught, this is funny because if it was him he may have jeopardized his future, and perhaps the reputation of his father. If he did to it he and his father should be further investigated to make sure that David did this of his own will. All computer equipment should be seized and logs collected.
If David Kernell Didn’t do it you have to give credit to who ever pulled this off. I mean, if they never get caught and this was their plan then bravo. bravo. Use a script kiddie technique to obtain your information, post it under some one else’s name and then divert attention to the media blaming some one else. If the proxy had been gamed then that adds even more points.
Here is more information from seclists on the case:
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Dave Korn
> Dave Aitel wrote on 17 September 2008 18:44:
>
>> http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_inbox_2008
>
> >From that page:
>
> “Nb. The ‘ctunnel.com’ reference in the browser screen shots is to a proxy
> service used to prevent the activists from being traced.”
[snip]
> So let me see if I’ve guessed this right: it’s a proxy that rewrites all
> your URLs in rot-13? And this is supposed to “protect your anonymity”?
>
> Those activists are screwed. They better get out of the country PDQ.
> Pardon me, but I’ll be sticking with proper mix chains for now.
Well this was predictable[1]:
“A Tennessee state legislator has confirmed that his son, a
20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, is the
person being named on blogs and message boards in connection with the
hacking of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mail account, a Nashville paper
reported late yesterday.”
“State Rep. Mike Kernell told the Tennessean that his son, David
Kernell, is at the center of speculation about the identity of the
hacker who gained access to Palin’s account.”
“On Wednesday, someone identified only as “rubico” posted a
message to 4chan.org’s popular /b/ board claiming to have gained
access to Palin’s e-mail by using Yahoo’s password reset feature.
Although the post was deleted from 4chan.org, a copy was sent to
conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who published it on
her blog Wednesday.”
But it gets better: why worry about the suitability of ROT-13 when you
have logs? I believe the term is “LULZ!”:
“Gabriel Ramuglia, the webmaster of an Athens, Ga.-based proxy
service, may be able to shed light on the identity of the hacker as
early as today. On Thursday, Ramuglia said that the FBI had contacted
both him and Yahoo the day before, asking for server logs to determine
who had accessed Palin’s account.
“Ramuglia operates Ctunnel, an ad-supported proxy service targeted
primarily at users in schools or businesses who want to access sites
that are normally blocked by network administrators. Screenshots of
several messages from Palin’s account showed that the hacker had used
Ramuglia’s proxy service in an attempt to hide his or her tracks.”
“He was also confident he would be able to pinpoint the person who
used his proxy service to access Palin’s account. “I should be able to
track it down to their original ISP, and then the IP address of the
person who did it,” Ramuglia said. “Who did this abused my service and
broke the law.”"
Add comment September 19th, 2008