A group of hackers managed to break in the Yahoo Mail account belonging to Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president. The group that calls itself "Anonymous," announced that it had cracked into Palin's Yahoo account in a message last night to a site that regularly posts confidential documents.

The group posted five screenshots, two digital photos of Mrs Palin's family and an address book to the whistle-blowing Wikileaks website.

The hackers also claimed that the information was taken from Ms Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com e-mail account.

"The matter has been turned over the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them," the McCain campaign said in a statement.

It appears that despite safety measures that must have been taken, Palin did handle governor's business from the address gov.sarah@yahoo.com. However, that is not the account that Anonymous hacked. Screen shots of the Yahoo pages posted to Wikileaks show that they had access to a gov.palin@yahoo.com address. Palin is very likely to have been using several Yahoo addresses in order to keep e-mail from friends and family separate from her other mail, said Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging technologies with e-mail security vendor Cloudmark.

The e-mails included a draft to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another concerning nomination to Alaska's state court of appeal and others dealing with the Alaska Department of Public Safety, according to Wikileaks.

Palin's Yahoo e-mail accounts both were canceled on Wednesday. Despite what people might think, the hacker didn’t have to work too hard. He simply reset Palin's password using her birth date, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse (the security question on her Yahoo account), which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.