UAF alumus’ Web site used in the hacking of Palin’s e-mail

Photos courtesty Gawker.com
One of the screenshots of Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account posted on the Web site gawker.com on Sept. 17.

A former UAF student’s proxy server was used to hack vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin’s private e-mail account.

Gabriel Ramuglia runs a Web site called vtunnel.com, designed to enable Internet users to get past URL or IP filters, which could prevent people from accessing sites like MySpace or YouTube.

These sites are frequently blocked by schools and businesses because of their distracting nature and potentially questionable content.

“Vtunnel is a web-based proxy server,” Ramuglia explained. “If you need to get to a Web site that would normally be blocked, it makes it look like you’re accessing it from my computer.”

According to the site gawker.com, Tennessee University student David Kernell accessed Gov. Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account. The site posted screenshots of the hack on Sept. 17.

Kernell, who is the son of a democratic state representative, allegedly accessed Palin’s account by answering her password reset question using public knowledge about the candidate.

Before accessing the Alaska governor’s personal e-mail, Kernell supposedly used vtunnel to prevent his computer from being traced.

Unfortunately for Kernell, Ramuglia has a policy of keeping logs of the computers that utilize his site.

“I’ve had to deal with things like this in the past. Like kids who think it is funny to send a bomb threat to their school.” Ramuglia said. However, he said such occurrences are rare.

“The amount of abuse is kind of low in comparison with the people that use the site.”

About 1.5 million users go to the site each day, Ramuglia said.

For the most part, the people who use his site live in Turkey and want to go to YouTube, a site which has been banned in the country because of the posting of illegal content, namely the vilification of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

When he got a subpoena from the FBI, Ramuglia was more than willing to supply the government with the log of the computer that used his site to access Palin’s email.

“There aren’t too many laws for what kind of rules there are for a service like mine,” Ramuglia said. “I don’t want to do something to make people say, ‘There ought to be a law!’”

Ramuglia is an undecided voter who now resides in Athens, Ga. He left Alaska to escape the cold and dark before Palin became governor and claims that it is a coincidence that his site was used to access her e-mail.

His servers are in Illinois, the home state of Democratic candidate for president Barack Obama, but he said that, too, is a coincidence.

Ramuglia has previously been featured in the Sun Star when he got in trouble at UAF in 2001 for using the university ethernet connection to transfer 1.3 terabytes of data.

At the time, University officials told him his abuse of bandwidth could have cost the university as much as $250,000.

“Either UAF is really getting screwed for what they’re using on bandwidth or they were just jerks,” said Ramuglia.