If this is true, it’s a perfect example of why most “secret question”-based password recovery schemes are worthless. Most of the questions are easily answered from public knowledge. And that’s how Governor Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked:

it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…

This is Yahoo’s fault; it’s hard to blame them, though, everyone does it. We do it at the university I work at. Even my bank does it. (And no, I didn’t answer them correctly. Please don’t hack my bank account.)

Yahoo and everyone else need to change their policies here.

Oh, and what did the hacker get from Governor Palin’s e-mails? Nothing:

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family

So they posted private pictures of her family to the net. Congratulations.