Pandora: Why McCartney is feeling hacked off

(AFP/Getty Images )

Disastrous news. Sir Paul McCartney, patron saint of pop, has become the latest victim in a string of bizarre celebrity hackings.

I'm told that the Beatle's website – which is accessed by thousands of his fans each day – was recently infected by the so-called "LuckySploit Toolkit", allowing hackers to access the personal details of everyone visiting the site by tracking their keyboard strokes.

Curiously, the incident occurred just moments after McCartney, pictured, was reunited with his former band mate Ringo Starr at Saturday's David Lynch benefit.

"They obviously chose that time because they knew the site would be busy. We've seen this before with Paris Hilton and it can cause all sorts of problems," explains a a spokesman for ScanSafe, the company that spotted the problem.

"One of our clients was actually using the site and reported it to us. Hackers like these do around one site a week and obviously the more high-profile it is, the better."

Despite the incident, Pandora is assured that any hackers have since been dispensed with by McCartney's online team. "Once we discovered what was going on, we sorted it out immediately," confirms a representative.

Rupert's unwanted compliment

*Disappointingly, Rupert Everett's recent charm offensive appears to have gone awry. The doe-eyed actor observed earlier this week that his sometime employer Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was capable of eliciting "the purest sounds of pleasure [he] had ever heard" from a woman, a discovery he made after staying in an adjacent hotel room. His words, however, have been met with uncharacteristic bashfulness from Carter who is, colleagues have said, "still trying to figure out who was using his room".

Piers weighs in on the Brazilian

Women, rejoice: you – or, rather, your bikini lines – have a new champion, in the apparently liberated form of Piers Morgan. "The Seventies are cool again, right?" enthuses the former Mirror editor in his latest incarnation as Glamour magazine's agony aunt. "Short of a woman arriving with a full beard and a hairier chest than Sean Connery, I wouldn't give a monkey's".

Also up for debate is the subject of female flatulence. "My idea of hell would be a pint-guzzling serial expeller of wind," reasons Morgan. "Women should be glamorous, feminine, amusing, well-dressed, sweet-tongued, and have a healthy disdain for football. No man, if he is honest, has any desire to associate his girlfriend with 99 per cent of lavatory functions or bodily fluids." Edifying, isn't it?

An unusual lunch date for Kelly

*There was a curious meeting of minds at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados. Pandora hears that Kelly Brook was seen chatting with – of all the unsavoury characters – Mark Thatcher over a spot of lunch."They were with a group of people laughing and drinking and having a roast at one of the best tables," observed my spy. Quite what the pair had to talk about, we can't be sure. The weather perhaps? The rugby? Or maybe it was the pros and cons of overthrowing Central African dictators? Goodness knows.

Chace skips his trip to London

*Chace Crawford, Pandora's absolute favourite member of the Gossip Girl cast, has just landed a plum role in Joel Schumacher's next project Twelve. This, undoubtedly, is very good news indeed for Crawford, left, though it's a rather tragic development for us, since it means he will be forced to postpone a planned trip to London. "Shooting begins in just a few weeks," explains my source. "He'll have to lose loads of weight and is on an intense diet." A diet which doesn't involve a pint of the capital's best bitter, it would seem.