If you think that politics makes for strange bedfellows, take a look at the effort to raise public awareness about cybercrime. Because we’ve seen no stranger pairing than the partnership between rapper Snoop Dogg (of Snoop Doggy Dogg fame) and Internet security outfit Symantec, of Norton Antivirus fame. In their “Hack is Wack” (“wack” as in “wacky”, even though we think it should be “Hack is Whack” as in “we’re going to whack those hackers” – but what do you expect from someone who spells it “Dogg” instead of “Snoop Dog”?) contest, average Joes and Janes can submit a rap-like anti-cybercrime message of any length under two minutes, in the hopes of winning a prize that includes a tricked-out laptop, a trip for two to LA to meet with Snoop’s management, and two tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert. Woof.

Now, there’s something you might think you’d never hear: that the President of the United States has a Twitter account, let alone that it got hacked. But it’s true. Well, it’s nearly true, as in reality Barack Obama does not, himself, man a Twitter account (so far as anyone knows). But there is a “BarackObama” Twitter account that is manned on behalf of the President of the United States by the organization known as Organizing for America, that calls itself “the grassroots organization for President Obama’s agenda for change”, and that account was hacked.

If you were hit by the recent Wordpress hack which redirects your visitors to paymoneysystem.info and paymoneysystem.info/in.cgi?michaeleknowlton, you may be wondering just who exactly Michael Knowlton is, and why (and how) he hacked your website. Here’s the run-down.

There is a brand new Wordpress hack attack making the rounds, that redirects all traffic to your site through itsallbreaksoft.net and paymoneysystem.info, and then on to any number of junk sites full of advertisements. The intermediate redirect to paymoneysystem.info actually goes through the URL paymoneysystem.info/in.cgi?michaeleknowlton, suggesting that someone using the name Michael Knowlton is going to be benefiting from any monies earned by the ads. Here’s how it was done, and how to fix it. Fortunately, the immediate fix is very easy.

By now you may have read about how Tracy Turkish Brooks and her “other pussy” had an embarrassing Facebook moment when she – supposedly – posted a very steamy note to “Michael”, and accidentally published it for the world to see instead of sending it via private Facebook email. The post, which was real enough, read “Thank you too, Micheal, I had a great time as well.I’m glad you enjoyed my OTHER pussy ;). I must admit, I haven’t had sex in a while, so getting mounted by such a strong and powerful man was a pleasant surprise after so many long months of …abstinence. I hope this message doesn’t scare you off, I just wanted you to know what a wonderful time I had with you.You are permanently invited to “the love cave between my legs”” However, while the post was real, by all accounts, the person who posted it was not Tracy Turkish Brooks – rather, her Facebook account was hacked.

If you use Gmail, and also use Facebook, it can be very easy for someone to password crack and access your Gmail account using Gmail’s recover password retrieval feature. This is because Gmail’s access password recovery feature allows anybody to guess the answer to your “forgot password” reset security question. And if the answer to your forgotten password reset security question happens to be information easily gleaned from your Facebook account (or some other social network information), then password hacking your Gmail account is as easy as typing in that password protection answer. (And we use the term “password protection” loosely.)

Gary McKinnon, the self-confessed pot-smoking, Asperger’s-diagnosed British hacker who went by the nickname “Solo”, and who hacked into several U.S. military computer systems (including at the Pentagon and NASA) and now faces extradition to the U.S. to stand trial, has none other than former hostage and Anglican envoy Terry Waite pulling for him.

Stupid users are the worst problem on the Internet, according to this survey of more than 600 Internet users.

A breaking news report (why is it breaking in England, not here in the U.S.?) reveals that millions of Citibank customers’ accounts are at risk as a result of what the London Times is calling the “biggest and most effective remote PIN code theft scam in US banking history.”

Ah, the audacity of hopeless childish pranks. The long and drawn-out contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to seek the Democratic nomination has for the last few weeks descended into trench warfare. The slinging of barbs and arrows is carried out on every media, including online, where an enterprising Clinton supporter recently hacked the Obama web site; visitors to the community blogs section were redirected to the Clinton web site.

A new hack has Wordpress hackers disabling all of your Wordpress plugins (including, you see, Akismet or any other anti-spam comment spam stopper plugin), which then allows them to inject comment spam into your blog at will. So if you suddenly find yourself getting an enormous amount of comment spam all at once, or if you suddenly find your blog pages coming up blank (because with your plugins disabled, that often can be the case) you may be the victim of this latest plugin-disabling comment spam hack.

Last month someone hacked the DNS for the Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) – a California state agency which lives at tam.ca.gov – allowing the hackers to use the TAM system to redirect traffic to some porn sites. As a result, the Federal government dropped the entire state of California’s Internet domain from the entire DNS system!

Do you want to stay connected via ssh to a remote computer, even when you’re idle? Whether you are on a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, don’t you just hate it when you are connected to a remote system via ssh, and you do something in another window, only to find when you return to your ssh session that you’ve been automatically disconnected by the remote system, and you have to log in all over again? Here’s how make it so that you can stay connected to the remote computer with ssh no matter how long you are idle.

The Superbowl Trojan, as some are calling it, has been implanted on dozens of Super Bowl related websites, and is installing itself on any Windows computer that happens to visit any of the Super Bowl sites without adequate protection. The Super Bowl Trojan allows the hacker to take full control over any of these infected Windows PCs by connecting the machine to dv521.com, downloading the W1C.exe file, and installing the Wow-PK Trojan.

Chris Hughes has created a video of how to control your Roomba vacuum with your Nintendo Wii remote control – as Roomba hacks go it’s a good one – and the video is taking the Internet by storm. Oh, and if you want to try this Roomba hack at home, Chris has also provided the source code!