Safety First!

I use — and have been very happy with — an anti-virus software called Avast…and believe me, I went through a lot of them before I settled on that one. It's lightweight, it's non-intrusive, it catches no-no's that might otherwise infest my system…pretty good product. It has given me great peace of mind while using the Internet.

Just now, I had a question and I went to their online Support Forum to see if the answer might be there. What I found instead was a page with this at the top of it…

AVAST forum offline due to attack

The AVAST forum is currently offline and will remain so for a brief period. It was hacked over this past weekend and user nicknames, user names, email addresses and hashed (one-way encrypted) passwords were compromised. Even though the passwords were hashed, it could be possible for a sophisticated thief to derive many of the passwords. If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords immediately. Once our forum is back online, all users will be required to set new passwords as the compromised passwords will no longer work.

This issue only affects our community-support forum. No payment, license, or financial systems or other data were compromised.

I now have a little less peace of mind while using the Internet.