Gabriel Ramuglia, the webmaster of a proxy service, may be able to shed light on the identity of the hacker. On Thursday, Ramuglia said that the FBI had contacted both him and Yahoo the day before, asking for server logs to determine who had accessed Palin's account.
Ramuglia operates Ctunnel, an ad-supported proxy service targeted primarily at users in schools or businesses who want to access sites that are normally blocked by network administrators. Screenshots of several messages from Palin's account showed that the hacker had used Ramuglia's proxy service in an attempt to hide his or her tracks.
Ramuglia was in the middle of transferring about 80GB of log file data day and hoped to start searching through it sometime today. "The FBI told me that they had asked for information by tomorrow [Friday] from Yahoo," Ramuglia said. "That's about the time frame I'll be able to search my logs."
He was also confident he would be able to pinpoint the person who used his proxy service to access Palin's account. "I should be able to track it down to their original ISP, and then the IP address of the person who did it," Ramuglia said. "Who did this abused my service and broke the law."
Both the FBI and US Secret Service have opened investigations, but neither agency has made any public announcements of suspects or arrests.