Palin Email Hacker Suspect Found

by Terri Potratz | September 22, 2008 at 08:25 am

136 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

The infamous Palin email hacker has been traced through a proxy server trail to 20-year old University of Tennessee student David Kernell, son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell. Using the handle Rubico, Kernell allegedly gloated about his hack on 4chan.org, where he made the error that got him caught:

Rubico used a proxy server that shields the source IP address from website logging scripts. While this sounds great, Rubico posted, “Yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this sh** ever got to the FBI I was FU****”

In his gloating, Rubico posted up screenshots of the Yahoo account complete with the full URL which included the proxy server url (ctunnel.com) appended with a unique identifier. For example, we used ctunnel.com to surf to YouTube and the URL reads - http://ctunnel.com/index.php/1010110A/58... So it doesn’t take a genius to go through the logs and match up the ID to the appropriate IP address and BAM, you got the hacker.

This news had made its way onto the internet as of Friday evening, but reports that Kernell was the suspect were unconfirmed - until now:

The FBI searched the apartment of alleged hacker David Kernell on Sunday morning, and three of Kernell's roommates could testify this week about the case before a grand jury in Chattanooga, according to local news reports.

After it was discovered that the Republican vice presidential candidate's personal Yahoo e-mail account was hacked into, reports began circulating that the hack could be traced back to Kernell.