Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) personal Yahoo! e-mail account was hacked by a vigilante group of Internet users, the news and gossip website Gawker is reporting.
Gawker has screenshots purportedly snapped from Palin’s account, gov.palin@yahoo.com, and is displaying images of e-mails allegedly sent by Palin on its site.
The send/receive list includes a Palin aide, and Gawker suggests Palin could have used her personal account to conduct state business, which could complicate public records requests.
The password to gov.palin@yahoo.com was initially obtained by Anonymous, a group of Internet users who have previously attacked the Church of Scientology’s website, inundating it with traffic and temporarily rendering it unavailable for viewing. The group posted the screenshots to image hosting site Imageshack and message board 4-Chan; the images have since been deleted from those sites.