Police called after Romney's email and Dropbox accounts cracked

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/06/romney_hacked_hotmail_gmail/

6th June 2012 20:29 GMT

Police are investigating a claimed cracking of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's Hotmail and Dropbox accounts.

An anonymous tipster claims to have accessed Romney's accounts by answering the security question needed to gain access. Using publically available information the attacker claims to have correctly guessed the name of Romney's pet in order to scan his Hotmail account, and then found the same password was used on for the candidate's Dropbox login.


"I have nothing to do with Anonymous and have never done anything like this before," the person told Gawker, although no corroborating screen shots or email were included in the message. Romney's campaign team has said the authorities are investigating.

It's an unfortunate slip for Romney. He takes security very seriously, as shown when he finished his previous job as governor of Massachusetts. Romney's management team purchased 17 hard drives they had been using for $65 apiece and purged the email servers completely, leaving no electronic records intact from 2002 to 2006, although there are 700 to 800 boxes of documentation.

*end of excerpt*

Original article at Gawker.com HERE

[Skinner]

1. Username: [email protected]

Password: seamus

[steve2470]

2. haha ! nt

[Historic NY]

3. Sheamus?

a rocket scientest isn't needed to figure that out.

[steve2470]

4. Mitt Romney’s Hotmail Hacker Would Like You to Know That He Is Very, Very Sorry

http://gawker.com/5916349/mitt-romneys-hotmail-hacker-would-like-you-to-know-that-he-is-very-very-sorry#13390751218434&

Yesterday, a tipster sent us a note indicating that he had successfully accessed Mitt Romney's Hotmail and DropBox accounts after guessing the answer to a security question—Romney's favorite pet. The Romney campaign later confirmed that "the proper authorities are investigating [the] crime." Now that tipster has written a letter of apology to Romney. Here it is.

Yesterday's original tip about the hack contained frustratingly little evidence—make that none—that the tipster had actually conducted the caper. He or she simply provided us with an alleged new password for Romney's [email protected] account, as well as the associated DropBox account, and invited us to log in. Since unauthorized access of an email account is viewed in certain law enforcement circles as a federal crime, we demurred.

A few screengrabs or copies of the emails would have been nice, though. We wrote back asking if the tipster had any proof of the hack claim, and concurrently sought comment from the Romney campaign. After we published a story on it last night, the tipster wrote us back and sounded...regretful.

Hello. Shortly after I sent the tip I did access the account. It was mostly newsletter Spam and a few short correspondences. While going through these I started to feel very guilty about what I had done. I then sent an email to one person in the contact list explaining and apologizing for what had happened and adding that I was going to try to close both accounts so that no one else could get in. I succeeded in doing this with the DropBox account but was unable to do so with the email do to it being a paid account. I instead changed the password and the answer to the security question and emailed the contact with both changes so that they might be able to shut down the account on their own.

*more at link above*

[Not Me]

5. Does it strike anyone else as odd

that this guy who has nearly $250Mil is using free hotmail account(s)?
Come on you cheap idiot...secure email and storage is not that expensive.

Also makes you wonder if he is the person who is going to oversee CIA, NSA, Homeland Security etc.