The Webmaster of a proxy service called Ctunnel.com, which may have been used by a hacker to illegally access the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, is working with law enforcement authorities to track down the person behind the break-in.

Gabriel Ramuglia, the Athens, Ga.-based Webmaster of Ctunnel, said Thursday that URLs in screenshots of Palin's e-mail -- photos were posted online Wednesday on 4chan.org and other sites -- suggested that whoever accessed her Yahoo! account had used his proxy service.

Ramuglia said in an interview that he was contacted by FBI officials last night and asked to retain computer logs of the last few days' activity on his service and make sure nothing is deleted. Ramuglia, who normally stores only a week's worth of log data, said he would not have deleted anything anyway because of the illegal nature of what had happened.

Ramuglia is now in the process of importing more than 80GB worth of log data into a database for analysis. He said he's reasonably confident he can help authorities sift through the logs and trace access back to the originating IP address -- especially because the self-professed hacker has admitted using just one proxy service to access Palin's account.

The alleged hacker said in an online posting that he gained access by simply resetting the password to Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account using its password recovery service. That's according to a description of events posted on a blog site run by conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin.

The first-person account was originally posted on a Web site called 4chan.org by a poster identified only as "Rubico." That post, along with a related thread, was later deleted from that site -- but not before a reader of Malkin's blog apparently snagged a copy of it and sent it along to Malkin. Rubico's claims could not be verified and security analysts have been skeptical of the claims.

According to the Malkin blog reader, 4chan.org hosts multiple boards, each of which is dedicated to specific subjects. The individual who first broke into Palin's e-mail account apparently belonged to a group called /b/, which the reader described as the "most notorious" of the boards on 4chan.org.. /b/tards, as its denizens are called, are interested only in their own amusement," the reader claimed.

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