This article is from the archive of our partner .
Late Wednesday afternoon, ABC's Jake Tapper had a sizzling scoop: On a day when America's largest credit card companies were getting hammered by cybe-attacks--so too was Sarah Palin. Tapper produced an e-mail from Palin saying the website for her political action committee, SarahPAC, was under siege by WikiLeaks-supporting hackers. Palin's aide, Rebecca Mansour, added that Sarah and Todd's credit card accounts had been compromised. In Palin's e-mail to Tapper, she offered some on-the-spot commentary.
"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," Palin said, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. "This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."
The Palin camp blamed the attacks on "Operation Payback," an effort led by the hacker group "Anonymous" that shutdown MasterCard's website Wednesday. According to a developer at SarahPac.com, the site was hit with a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, a method of harnessing multiple computers to request data from a single website and overload its servers. The developer told Tapper that "a group loosely known as Anon_Ops, used a tool called LOIC (Lower Orbit Ion Cannon) to flood sarahpac.com."