It has been a big weekend for electronic espionage and diplomatic hacktivism, with world leaders bugged, mocked, cracked and embarrassed as a result.

Late last week the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev tweeted his resignation along with criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

“I'm resigning. I'm ashamed of the government's actions. Forgive me,” Mr Medvedev's Russian-language Twitter account said.

“I've wanted to say this for a long time: Vova you’re wrong!” another tweet said, ‘Vova’ being a nickname for Vladimir.

Soon after the revelations, government spokespeople told news agencies that Mr Medvedev's “Twitter account has been hacked, the messages are not genuine. We're working on the problem”.

“Crimea isn't ours. Please retweet,” came a message posted after the government said it was dealing with the breach.

Days later it was revealed that Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop’s phone was “compromised” during international travel in the wake of the Malaysia Airlines MH17 attack.

Australian intelligence officials have reportedly seized Ms Bishop's phone upon her return to Australia, but they claim that top-secret briefings with the National Security Committee are done separate, secure lines.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on the weekend that other countries do “target the phones of significant members of the Australian Government”, presumably in the same way that the Australian Government targets the phones of significant members of foreign governments.

Along the same lines, it has been revealed that German foreign intelligence bugged and recorded US secretary of state John Kerry's phone, according to a German magazine.

German press Der Spiegel cites unnamed sources in allegations that agents at Germany's foreign intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), intercepted and recorded Mr Kerry during Middle East negotiations between Israelis, Palestinians and Arab states last year.

It claims that the call was immediately deleted, unlike a similar alleged recording made of talks between Kerry's predecessor Hillary Clinton and former UN chief Kofi Annan in 2012.

A BND spokesperson has told Reuters that Germany does not tap the phones of allied countries and that the United States is not a target.