.........actually what somebody has probably gone and done is to get a copy of something like 'MemoWeb 3' (yours for £29.99 from PC World) and 'grab' the whole PPRuNe (well as much as they're allowed to see, that is - e.g. the browsable page contents ).
Indeed, for all those folks who've been in receipt of 'unsolicited emails', and in particular which have apparently emanated from your PPRuNe account email address, this is almost certainly how it's been done - the download 'bot just grabs the email addresses from the PPRuNe pages and saves them to the 'bot users PC; all rather too easy really - but a far cry from being hacked.
Now w.r.t. some specifics....:
The guys I've spoken to are convinced it has been done and say that they have seen this bit of paper...... A piece of paper containing the details of nearly 35000+ PPRuNers would be quite a weighty tome !
No system is hack-proof. No software is uncrackable - if... someone wants in badly enough...... True, but why on earth would somebody want access to the details we hold, i.e. most of the email addresses we hold are so indeterminable as to be almost useless, and a lot of the other stuff in folk's profiles is about as useful as a chocolate teapot !
If someone did it just for the hell of it, because it could be done, then we'll probably never hear about it again..... I agree once again - but perhaps the bottom line is that whilst any such hack would be annoying (from a technical stand-point) - they've done no harm; Sh!t even if they crashed the server we can always rebuild it and, as mentioned above, it's not as if we have rack loads of confidential information or some such.
So perhaps a case of habeas corpus (or in plain English...... thus far, an awful lot of "If's, but's, and maybe's") ?!
Ps. Folks, perhaps this just goes to prove that you should all avail yourself of:
A). Good anti-virus software (e.g, Sophos, Norton, MacAfee) and turn it on to monitor all programs & files (inc Emails), and to update it very regularly.
B). Make use of firewall hard/software, e.g. ZoneAlarm Pro.
C). Be careful about just what details you provide about yourself over / on the web !
[ 08 July 2001: Message edited by: CrashDive ]