New Charges Brought Against Sarah Palin's Hacker

During the presidential race in 2008, someone hacked into Sarah Palin’s personal email account and posted the contents online for the world to see. Whether or not it was “real hacking” is heavily debated (he used the forgotten password link and found the answer to her secret question on Wikipedia) but the FBI still had a huge problem with it. The Tennessee student was yesterday charged with a couple of new offenses: fraud and obstruction-of-justice.

ComputerWorld today reports that David Kernell, son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis, was arraigned five months after a federal grand jury first handed down charges against him. According to CW, he had been facing just one count of illegally accessing a protected computer, but prosecutors are now accusing him of three counts of computer fraud. Yikes.

Kernell pleaded not guilty to the charges; and when contacted by ComputerWorld last year, Gabriel Ramuglia (who runs Ctunnel the proxy site that the screenshots showed the attacker used) said he had identified the IP address and approximate location of whomever was responsible for the hack. He also said that it was not consistent with media reports. Interesting, no? Kernell’s trial is set for October 27. Plenty of time for the kid to sweat it out over summer.

Check out the full scoop on ComputerWorld.