Hi there, I am truly sorry that your personal privacy was put at danger due to the events here at Tip.It. Obviously it is never our intention to have the information stored here at Tip.It available to anybody else - this is against our Privacy Policy. I'm sure you are probably aware that the accessing of this information was a criminal act and not something we would willingly allow to happen if we had a choice in the matter. What actually happened, long story short, was that the hackers had access to the server for a limited amount of time in which they were probably able to download the entire forum user database. We are not able to tell exactly what was downloaded from our site, but we can safely assume they took anything containing user information that they could get their hands on. At the time, our primary focus was of course re-gaining full control over our server which we accomplished pretty quickly, but the inevitable had already been done by the time we had it back. As Hedgehog mentioned, we did have notices for our regular users plastered all over the front page and our forums, but it was a bit of an oversight to not send out a group email to all of our users explaining the situation. I actually can't remember if we did or didn't make an attempt to send out an email, but I would not be surprised if it was indeed an oversight. If this event could be replayed, we would certainly have done that. I make no excuses for the fact that we did not do this back when it was relevant and unfortunately it was a costly mistake in some ways. On behalf of the admin team I am very sorry this has caused grief for you and I hope that not too much damage has been done as a result. Sadly, this isn't a whole lot else we can do at this point to aide the situation. The criminal act of stealing our database is, in this case, comparable to that of a hit and run car accident in that it is hard to pin responsibility on anybody in particular besides the criminals. While we definitely accept that we are trusted to keep the information users give us safe, it was honestly just a bit out of our hands that these things happen. Our security wasn't exactly lax and it was the little things that enabled them to get into our server, not gaping, obvious and inviting security holes. If you have any further questions, feel free to get in touch with me or any administrator via private message. Kind regards, Cowman_133 Tip.It Administrator