The Conservatives recently developed a website designed to fire flak at Gordon Brown the purpose of which was to spread using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The site, called “Cash Gordon”, was intended to highlight the Labour party’s ties to the trade union Unite, with the slogan: “Charlie (Wheelan) gives the cash, Gordon gives the power.” But it got a bit more attention than the Tories bargained for when hackers discovered that basic security measures weren’t in place on the page.Which reportedly led to, amongst other mischief, visitors to the site being redirected to pornography, or the Labour home page.Within hours they had also discovered that lines of computer code could also be included – and used those to link to pictures (including pornographic ones), YouTube videos, malware and, finally, to redirect visitors to the Labour site. At which point the site was taken offline and visitors redirected to a page on the Conservative party site about Whelan. The site was quickly taken down, although it’s back up again now and appears to have been fixed.

This "anatomy of a hashtag by Meg Pikard demonstrates it perfectly.

It will be interesting to see what other potential banana skins the parties encounter over the coming weeks.