Oct 30th 2013, 10:34:43
There was more than one PDM account accessed by that same IP mentioned by Tavern and was 1 minute apart from the access through Hutch's account. There were no failed attempts which leads me to believe it is more than likely the password was known (i.e. was not brute force). The second account however was a retired members account and therefore had limited permissions.
My concern is for the members of PDM and the other alliances who had email account information taken from the same people who had knowledge of the password. People who reuse passwords between different accounts are at risk where their username is their email and the password is the same as that used on boxcar (e.g. ebay, email account providers, paypal etc).
Not only do the people who accessed this information have the potential ability to gather more personal information about the member but to onsell that information to other people who could use their email account to send spam email, send virus's etc.
I am sorry for those RDers who did nothing wrong, especially those who dedicate significant time to playing their country. However, I believe that the actions undertaken were appropriate as it would be hard for the admins to be able to permaban the three people specifically, due to the ability for them just to change their IP address in the same manner that they did when0 gaining access to people's accounts.
I hope those RDers who had their country deleted and know the members who did this do not encourage their return to the game. Hopefully those RDers who did do the right thing can restart either this set or next and continue to the play the game if they so choose under an RD tag that has all of its members playing clean.
AusPiggy
Director PDM
