Lots of you are asking lots of questions about the Sony PlayStation Network (“How was the Sony Play Station Network taken down?”, “Who hacked the the Sony PlayStation Network?”, “Is it true that it was done with rooted Sony PSP handhelds?”, and, perhaps most importantly, “Is the Sony PSN secure now?” To bring you up-to-date, if you are scratching your head right now, first, the Sony PlayStation Network (referred to in shorthand as the “PSN”) was taken down last month in a concerted cyber attack which, at first Sony claimed was down due to “maintenance” but, eventually, they admitted that a hacking attack had taken them down. The hacker or hackers also caused Sony’s Qriocity services to go down. Oh, and wait – it also extended to the Sony Online Entertainment network. In short, if you have ever completed any transaction online with Sony, you need to treat your identity and credit card information as compromised.

In an irony that was almost assuredly lost on them, AT and T today apologized by mass email to all of their iPad 3G customers for the security leak (i.e. the hackers which had hacked into the system) which exposed their iPad 3G customers’ email addresses, exposing them to the risk of being spammed. Here is the email which AT and T just sent out – note the fact that they sent it from a non-repliable email address, which is considered a no-no in email sending best practices.

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.

As Google threatens to pull completely out of China, following allegations that the hack attacks against Google, code named “Operation Aurora” and first disclosed by Google last month, originated at two Chinese universities with strong governmental ties, the Chinese government is trying their own brand of shaping the Internet – by encouraging its citizens to send “red text messages”, also being referred to as “red snippets” and even “red jokes” (although they are not jokes). The Chinese term actually translates as “Red Duan” – ‘duan’ relating to measurement, such as a piece or stretch of time – in other words, a red era. According to authorities in China, the red text message – or red snippet – is intended to facilitate “the spirit of Chinese culture for an Internet age” and to combat the invasion of American culture. In the meantime, Google contemplates pulling out of China altogether after their discoveries in the wake of the Operation Aurora hacks, unless China agrees to allowing uncensored search.

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.

Just this past week we told you about a vulnerability that all jailbreaked iPhones are at risk for, due to there being a default root password for SSH that most people who jailbreak their iPhones don’t (know to) change. Now, taking advantage of that same ‘default root password’ issue, countless jailbroke iPhone owners are finding Rick Astley’s mug on their iPhone, as jailbroken iPhones get “rickrolled” by the Ikee worm. (A “rickroll” (“rick roll”) is a fad that started a couple of years ago when, inexplicably, the video of Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” became the visual punchline to tricks played across the Internet, with links to supposedly topical content actually taking the user to the Astley video. To get so tricked is to get “rick rolled”.)

A Dutch hacker has demonstrated that jailbreaking your iPhone opens it up to a hack that allows your jailbroken iPhone to be easily accessed and remotely controlled. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t jail break your iPhone (or that you should, we pass no judgement on the act of jailbreaking an iPhone), but it does mean that if you are going to jailbreak your iPhone, you need to know how to close the security hole you will create (or already have created) by jailbreaking your iPhone.

A plague of rogue Facebook applications that are stealing user credentials – such as usernames and passwords – has been sweeping Facebook in the past week. The phishing Facebook apps work the same way that many other applications do – including sending an email to your Facebook friends, with links to click on, and when you type in your username and password, BAM! Your login credentials have been stolen.

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.)

As online society becomes ever more social, and cares ever less about personal security, the phrase “social security” seems more than ever an oxymoron. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly brought home than in this week’s announcement by researchers at Carnegie Mellon that they have cracked the social security code, and were able to predict with frightening accuracy many social sercurity numbers (SSN). In many cases, their hack was aided by information gleaned from such social networking sites as Facebook.

A new hotel network security study by Cornell University entitled “Hotel Network Security: A Study of Computer Networks in U.S. Hotels” has proven that using the wireless Internet – and even cabled Internet – at your hotel is almost always inherently insecure and unsafe.

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.