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.

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.

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.

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.