Paris Hilton’s sidekick was hacked in 2005, with all her contacts and personal photos posted online, and one of her old MySpace accounts was exposed in a security hole 2006. We were privy to many of Paris’ private photos, diary entries, and love letters after she failed to pay the bill for a storage space, and the contents were purchased and posted on a subscription website called Paris Exposed in early 2007. To add to Hilton’s digital woes, Paris’ official promotional website had a virus a couple of weeks ago, but it’s unknown how it got there exactly and if the site was hacked or if it had some kind of malicious ads.

Now Paris has confirmed that her Gmail account has been hacked. Given all we’ve seen of Paris, it makes sense that there’s little interest in her digital correspondence. Instead of bothering to post any of her private messages online the hackers decided that the best way to take advantage of the situation was to do some marketing to her contact list.

A hacker broke into Paris’ Gmail account and wrote messages while pretending to be the star, Life & Style has learned. “I can’t believe someone would hack into my e-mail account and send people e-mails acting as if they were me,” Paris tells Life & Style. “It’s such an invasion of privacy.”

After infiltrating the account, the impostor sent e-mails to the contacts in Paris’ address book, telling them to use a different but very similar e-mail address for her. The hacker went on to correspond with Paris’ pals and business acquaintances, according to an insider. The hoax continued until the intruder began asking Paris’ friends to promote an unknown Web site. Some recipients got suspicious and called [Paris] to find out if she was really sending the messages.

After realizing what was going on, Paris, 27, closed the account, and she plans to take the matter to the authorities, says an insider. “She’s been so busy, she hasn’t called the FBI yet, but she’s going to,” says the insider.

[From Life & Style, print edition, February 9, 2009

Having to change e-mail accounts is a mild annoyance that Paris will live with. She’s not going to bother to report this to the FBI. This isn’t like the time Sarah Palin’s account was breached, and is hardly a matter of national security. I wonder how the “hacker” did it. Gmail lets you set your own security questions and you can pick difficult ones that aren’t easily guessed. Yahoo!’s security is a little lax in that department because they have preset security questions to reset passwords, which was how people gained access to Palin’s account with known information about her. Paris probably picked a dumb, easy question like “pet’s name” for her security question, or maybe she uses the same simple password for everything and someone guessed what it was.

I’m kind of glad that we aren’t privy to reams of Paris’ e-mail as we would feel obligated to report on it. I wouldn’t want to make anyone read through all that drivel.

While I was looking for pictures of Paris to add to this story, of which there are always plenty, I found some photos taken at 2:30 in the morning outside her hotel in London on Friday morning. Paris is seen stepping in a wet spot that the photo agency says is vomit:

Paris Hilton arrives back at her hotel at 2.40am, after a very busy day and night promoting her new reality TV show. The strain of working such a long day appeared to tell, as Paris looked half asleep as she stepped out of her car. As she got out, snappers warned Paris not to walk through a pool of vomit, which was in the street. However she appeared to ignore their warnings, and walked straight through it, all the time smiling for the cameras of course!

[From WENN photo description]

Paris has a job to do, and she’s not going to let some puke get in her way. At least it wasn’t hers.

Paris is also shown in a see through top later that day, 1/30/09. Credit: WENN