Unfortunately during the afternoon of friday the 5th of March, we were hacked by a young gentlemen who shall remain nameless (well, more because I don't know his name).

The site was taken down relitavely rapidly, however there may have been some of you that recieved a message on their computer. If you accessed the site during this time, I strongly urge you to do a complete virus scan of your machine, as the "gentleman" (and I use that term quite loosely) planted an active-x trojan on the site. This has since been removed and the site has been restored, and will come back to complete working order of the next week. During this time (due to some security updates we have processed) RSS feeds may be offline for press release updates. This is an unfortunate byproduct of this.

To the best of our knowlege, no personal data from the databases was able to be accessed by the hacker.

I thank you for your continued patronage to the site, and I assure you, we have taken steps to ensure this event does not happen again.

We have invested in a managed hardware firewall that has been configured by a security professional.

We have invested in additional intrusion prevention and detection software

The web server has been "hack hardened" to ensure that exploits have been covered.

A remote "rsync" server will be set up in the next fortnight that data updates will be applied to at an undisclosed location, and essentially the online server will be a "dumb" server with fresh copies of the site sync'd to it once a day.

We take these matters extremely seriously, and we have undertaken these steps and many more to ensure the ongoing stability of the site, and security of data.

I thank you in advance for the next week of bringing the Press Releases, RSS feeds and external content into line, and assure you, we are well onto it.

Administrator