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Yesterday it emerged that Palin's personal email account with Yahoo had been hacked, and that several screenshots of messages had been released online along with details from her contact book and photographs of her family.

Since then a 20 year old university student named David Kernell, the son of a house

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representative from Tennessee, has claimed responsibility.

A message was posted by Kernell on the 4chan forum claiming that he was behind the attack, which he says involved little more than online research to find the necessary information to request a password reset.

"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," says the message, posted under the alias Rubico.

Kernell claims in the message that the motivation for the attack was to see if rumours that Palin had used her personal email account for business, which is not allowed under US law, were true. He claims that after reading every email in the account that this was not the case.

Kernell used a proxy to protect his identity when accessing the account, but the FBI began an investigation to find the perpetrator and had requested the proxy service to hand over its logs.