Newzbin Editor Admin Goes Rogue

Mr. White from Newzbin2 recently posted a news item to let members know their user data (email addresses) have been stolen.  A group of Newzbin editors along with an editor admin went rogue.  Stealing user data including member email addresses to start a new rival site.  Those who have read about the transition from Newzbin know much of the original code was procured to launch Newzbin2.  This is a different situation.

Mr. White recently updated the post to mention that no passwords were taken.  It sounds like the group responsible was more interested in the financial gain of acquiring Newzbin2 users for their new project.

Here’s the full news post from the Newzbin2 site:

A couple of our ex-editors and a Editor admin have decided to start up a rival site. fine so far, we don’t have an issue with having rivals. They hope to make a lot of money, so they say. Again, fine: an honest business that succeeds deserves its profit.

Alas, the rival site is not honest.

These rogue colleagues abused our, and your, trust by scraping your email addresses from admin pages accessible only to them. We have not, and would not, disclose your email to a third party without your prior consent.

We apologise to those of you who have had these emails but please be assured that we were not responsible and it is only (so far as we can tell) your email address that they have stolen. We hope that if you are spammed by them you will treat their email in the way traditionally reserved for spam.

We hope you won’t join them and reward their theft but if you are tempted to just consider this: if they would screw us when we’ve befriended them & given them rewards, would you be happy giving them your email address and credit card details? And what would people like this do if the MPA/RIAA demanded your details from them?

Please don’t disclose the name of the rival site in comments as we don’t want to give them link juice.

Update: no passwords were taken either.

The purpose of this post isn’t to pass judgement on the rogue Newzbin2 staff.  Although it would be easy to do given their actions.  We suggest you ignore any spam emails received from sites you haven’t registered to access.  Since it appears no passwords were stolen the incident should be limited to email.

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