InsanelyHacked!

So it appears someone with nothing better to do took it upon themselves to bring down the site for no good reason. They used an Invision PowerBoard exploit which allowed them to gain root access to the database, and after backing it up for their own gratification and future exploitation, they deleted it. I guess this is some people's idea of fun, but the simple fact is: it's a serious crime. So serious in fact, that the investigation has been passed to the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), and we have been able to provide them with a number of leads thanks to some sterling work from our excellent mods!

We'd like to take this opportunity to appologise for the fact that your email addresses have been compromised and may be passed/sold on to third parties who may like to inform you from time to time that is indeed possible to double the size of your genitalia and perform like a god or goddess in the bedroom. This is extremely unfortunate, but we can assure you that your passwords are safely encrypted on our server so we should be free of account abuse. However, if your password is not particularly strong, we recommend you change it to something stronger ASAP. This is because commonly used passwords could be compared against a list of their encrypted versions, so passwords such "hello" are really not a wise choice. We recommend that your password be at least 8 characters long and contain a mixture of letters and numbers.

When we purchased InsanelyMac we wrongly assumed that it was set up securely, and since the hosting equipment was part of the purchase, we saw no immediate reason to move the hosting away from ThePlanet. Obviously this incident has forced us to look carefully at the security arrangements, and as a result we have migrated the site over to our own servers, patched the forum to the latest version and added another layer of authentication where required. We have also revised our back-up strategy so that any future incidents can be recovered from more quickly. So despite being blackmailed by those claiming to be responsible for the attack, we are pleased to announce the return of InsanelyMac, now more secure than ever.