What tripe. Either she got smashed and sent out the email or the integrity of the Govt tech infrastructure (hahahaha I made a funny) is compromised.

It's probably Tony having a laugh while he's not doing much.

Kev

If it wasn't sent from a hacked account, how did they get access to the account so that the could determine who had received messages?

Unless they know who received the message, how was the followup message explaining it was a hack sent?

It's incredibly easy to spoof email. You don't even need to set up an email account to send an email [which appears to come] from a legitimate address.

Perhaps in your haste to criticise someone in government, you left your brain behind at Conservative HQ.

They being spammers. You don't actually think those are legitimate email addresses they use? I'm postmaster on a couple of domains and I get bounces to nonexistent email addresses (from equally nonexistent email addresses that the spammers seem to have gotten from somewhere). Come on. telnet to port 25 and go from there. There are so many open relays still out there. Or set up your own smtp server. Something like 80% of the bots I've looked at have one.

I think it was actually a rather obvious setup, a kind of fishing expedition. Presumably none of the journalists was stupid enough to rise to the first bait, so the scammer tried to back off and pretend it was an honest mistake in the first email, presumably hoping that one of them would respond with with something like "But what was that secret? Maybe we can work out a deal..."

Anyway, if it had been a real gmail account that was hacked, it's trivially easy to find out who got the original messages. Gmail retains the sent posts unless you delete them.

However, the deeper point is the low credibility of modern politicians. Even when they know the truth, none of us peon voters can believe anything they say. That's why rumors have so much traction--they're usually as plausible as anything that the politicos say, and quite often the worst rumors turn out to be true, too. Like Dubya was *REALLY* concerned about the severity of Scooter's sentence and had no concern with covering the Dick Cheney's arse?

well, I guess they would need to call the police to get gmail to give them access to the gmail account, oh wait these people are the goverment. Hi gmail it support it's gordon brown here, some wee tw@t has sent out some silly emails, can you give us the recipeint list?

"well, I guess they would need to call the police to get gmail to give them access to the gmail account, oh wait these people are the goverment. Hi gmail it support it's gordon brown here, some wee tw@t has sent out some silly emails, can you give us the recipeint list?"

Or perhaps they looked at the To: and Cc: fields in the email header, dumbass.

I agree with the anonymous coward, SMTP clues required.