A Newbs player managed to get access to the forums database recently, this intrusion was noticed this evening - the exploit used has been fixed, and the database changes the attacker made have been corrected.

If you are registered on the TF2Newbs forums and use that same password or secret question elsewhere I'd suggest changing them. I see evidence that the perp looked at the first 6000 records - I don't know if he kept a dump of them or not, but better safe than sorry.

The passwords are salted, and double hashed - [ md5(md5('password" . "salt")) ] - so it would be a pain in the ass to try to crack all of them (over 3800 salts) - but as said above - better safe than sorry. The secret question / answer is not encrypted.

The site will be down until noonish eastern time on Jan 8th, when the site comes back up I suggest everyone change their password on the forums also just as a precaution.

Sorry for the inconvience no other data was compromised as far as we can tell. If we determine any additional data was viewed I'll make another announcement.

If you have any questions please message Octo or Crap on steam.