A group of hackers has claimed to have cracked the code to access Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin's online email account, it has been reported.

The action has led to the involvement of the US Secret Service after the Yahoo web mail account was broken into by an anonymous team of rogue internet experts, it was revealed.

A pair of email addresses have now been deleted - gov.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com - the latter of which had been investigated by authorities after the dismissal of Mrs Palin's public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan.

Republican party officials stated: "This is a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law.

"The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them."

During Mrs Palin's first legislative session as Alaskan governor, she passed two major acts to overhaul the state's ethics laws and complete the construction of a gas pipeline.

A recent Connect survey found that the two major concerns about outsourcing services like IT support were 'loss of control' (56 per cent) and 'budget over-runs' (43 per cent)