As many as 250,000 Twitter accounts have been hacked and compromised, according to Twitter. According to Twitter, the attack “was not the work of amateurs,” in fact, says Twitter, “the attackers were extremely sophisticated.” Twitter users whose accounts were compromised in the attack have been sent the following email, advising them to change their password.

A Magistrate has recommended to the Federal court in Maine that a bank (in this case Ocean Bank of Maine) has no liability, even though it allowed hackers to remove more than $500,000 from one of the bank’s customers accounts. The customer, Patco Construction, had been the victim of the Zeus trojan, which steals passwords once surreptitiously installed on a victim’s computer.

Earlier this month, the NATO Rapporteur (and we explain what that is) released a draft report addressing, among other things, the scope and impact of the leaking of the Wikileaks documents by Private Bradley Manning, the threats and actions by “hacktivists” (activist hackers engaging in “hacktivism”), including the hacker collective known as “Anonymous”, and what counter-measures NATO and other such bodies might take.

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.

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.

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.

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.