I've just been flagged up on a potentially serious problem for the forums. And I need your help to try to keep the problem contained as we eliminate it.

If anyone receives an e-mail from the forum, stating that someone has tried logging in on your account, drop me a Private Message as quickly as you are able. In the e-mail, there will be an IP address and I will require that IP address to be sent to me.

One member has already contacted me about this issue and sadly, the IP address resolves to a huge network of bots that swarm Web sites for the purposes of scraping content and images and also trying to harvest e-mail addresses. So don't be terribly surprised to discover images and content from this Web site popping up in other places.

Without going into specific details, I've inserted a block for this network at the root level of this site and a subnet block for one known subnet of this domain at the forum level. Unfortunately, this network has a huge array of IP's and has even been discovered spoofing the Googlebot IP's.

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Your user account is not vulnerable to these types of attacks and the e-mail will note that someone TRIED to access your account. Your passwords are buried in an MD5 hash that is salted with this sites vB account number and then run through another MD5 hash. Your accounts are safe.
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Again, time is critical on this situation, so if you get an e-mail of this nature, PLEASE CONTACT ME ASAP!

Thanks for your help.