If you have ever had an account – even just to leave comments to articles and posts – on Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Kotaku, Deadspin, Fleshbot or Jalopnik, then you are in for a nasty surprise. Odds are good that your account has been compromised, and your user name and password posted on the Internet, as the result of security breach of Gawker Media’s servers that happened over the weekend. Gawker media does get points for alerting all of their users as soon as they discovered the breach (about 10 minutes ago as of the time of this posting on 6:20 p.m. PST on Monday, December 13th, 2010).

The growing backlash against the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and the suspension of Internet hosting and financial funding services such as MasterCard, Visa and Paypal (through which Wikileaks was receiving donations) have led to retaliation by so-called ‘hacktavists’ in the form of DOS and other cyber-attacks against the websites of MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and those Internet hosting and DNS services which have disconnected Wikileaks, in some cases bringing the services to their knees. Paypal was brought down yesterday, as were MasterCard and Visa.

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.

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.

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.

As many of the Internet Patrol’s regular readers know, Paris Hilton’s Sidekick was hacked, and the data was posted to the Internet, several months ago. And they also know that one Nicholas Lee Jacobsen pleaded guilty to the T-Mobile hacking which is assumed to have lead to Miss Hilton’s Sidekick account being hacked.

Yes, it’s true. During the time that the Tmobile system supporting the Tmobile Sidekick was hacked by Nicholas Lee Jacobsen, who just pleaded guilty for the Tmobile hacking, one of the accounts to which he had access was none other than Paris Hilton’s Sidekick account.