Confirmation:
Proxy service operator confirms IP address of hacker belongs to ISP that provides service to apartment searched by FBI The man who traced the IP address of the hacker who accessed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mail account last week confirmed today that it belongs to an Illinois company that provides Internet service to the Knoxville, Tenn., apartment complex where the FBI served a search warrant early Sunday.
Gabriel Ramuglia, the webmaster of Ctunnel, an Athens, Ga.-based proxy service used by the hacker to mask his or her identity, acknowledged that the IP address he found in his server logs belongs to Pavlov Media, an Internet service provider based in Champaign, Ill. According to its Web site, Pavlov Media provides Internet, television and phone services to The Commons at Knoxville, a complex that specializes in apartments for students of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
From Quipster FBI Crashes Suspected Palin-Hacker Party
Of interest, without further information though, per WBIR,
Witnesses say Kernell and his friends fled the apartment when the FBI agents arrived.
Kernell’s three roommates were also subpoenaed, and must testify this week in Chattanooga, according to the witness.
Very interesting read at college politico http://thecollegepolitico.com/newsbusters-looks-into-my-original-palin-email-scandal-here-are-their-concerns-and-my-response/ concerning the address.
Update: What downer of a party at 1:00AM this morning as the Feds served a search warrant to Mr. Kernall:
A person who identified himself as a witness tells 10 News that agents with the FBI served a federal search warrant at the Fort Sanders residence of David Kernell early Sunday morning. Kernell lives in the Commons apartment complex at 1115 Highland Ave… A Department of Justice spokesperson confirmed there has been “investigatory activity” in Knoxville regarding the Palin case, but she said there are no publicly available search warrants, and no charges have been filed. A separate law enforcement source confirmed to 10 News that a search warrant was served on Kernell’s apartment. According to the witness, several agents arrived at The Commons of Knoxville around midnight. They presented their badges upon entering Kernell’s apartment, where several students were having a party, and took down their names.
The witness tells us they asked him and those who did not live in the unit to go outside. He believes the investigators took about 1.5 to 2 hours taking pictures of everything inside the apartment.
Still in search of Rubico. Identification check:
…if this is all a coincidence or a case of mistaken identity, it’s a pretty spectacular one. Exit quotation: “David Kernell excelled at chess while at Germantown High School and won the 2004 Tennessee Open Scholastic Chess Championship. Internet searches show someone uses the handle rubico on chess Web sites. In addition, an inactive blog, with one post dated May 2004, included rubico as a username. Its author identified himself as a chess player from Memphis named David.”
Truth but questions still linger:
The Washington Post published a private e-mail address of Palin’s back on September 10: gov.sarah@yahoo.com. But that’s not the address that got hacked.
Several other posters handed over the contents of the e-mail account gov.palin@yahoo.com to Wikileaks.org, a site that anonymously hosts leaked government and corporate documents. Wikileaks posted screen shots of two e-mails, Palin’s contact list, and her inbox list, along with two previously unpublished family photos, according to a story on Wikileaks. That address was previously unknown but another, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, already had been mentioned in published reports.
Ars Technica also says it was unknown. People are speculating that it came from the Democrats’ oppo research memo from two years ago that Politico recently published, but I don’t see it in there. So where’d it come from? Three obvious possibilities:
1. The hacker stumbled across the gov.sarah address in the Post and simply guessed there was a gov.palin address, too. Unlikely, though. Why waste time trying to hack accounts that might not exist when you could be trying to hack one that does?
2. Per the AP e-mail republished by Michelle, Palin’s “critics” got the address from records of e-mail communications obtained from the governor’s office. Plausible, but how’d it get from those critics to some 20-year-old /b/tard at 4Chan? And before you say “His dad’s a Democratic pol,” tell me why that info would be leaking down to the level of Tennessee state legislators.
3. One of Palin’s political enemies either corresponded with her personally at that address or got hold of it somehow through someone who did. Same problem as in number two.
The obvious answer is that the /b/tard saw the address online where someone privy to it had posted it. But after Googling around, I can’t see where. The closest I’ve come to finding a pre-hack mention is in the tags at the end of this post at Sarah Palin Truth Squad on September 10, but I think that’s just a case of a tag being added later and then applying retroactively to an already published post. Besides, it’s hard to believe “rubico” would have found it there.
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/18/good-question-how-did-the-hacker-get-palins-e-mail-address/
