Based on a post from underpressure, let me offer a few words to those with questions (and the reference of "the big-guy" comes from underpresssure, not from myself.)

There is an excellent review of what happened this last weekend within this thread as posted by attorney28.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum.../000933-3.html

When reading (it's just over half way down the page where attorney28 is responding to gleff's question), please note the correction by Punki and then you have it.

What I want to commnet on are the instances whereby a few members had their user accounts hi-jacked. This has happened before (just two or three times in the last five years). In each situation, we have believed that the hi-jack was caused by another member inappropriately having access to a users password or other cause. Sometimes this happens because of communal use of a computer at some event, sometimes it happens by use of a same password with other Web sites, sometimes it happens quite by accident. For instance, one member contacted us this morning about their account being hi-jacked. But an hour later they contacted us to say it wasn't at all a hi-jack caused by FlyerTalk - it was caused by a browser change on their end. I have the assurance of my tech team assigned to FlyerTalk, that it has not happened because of a security lapse on our end. There are just four people in the world that have access to FlyerTalk protocols and I'm one of them. The tech team has no interest at all in the FlyerTalk Community other than to make sure it works right for its members. We change passwords from time to time and in each incident of a hi-jack, scour our Weblogs and other data at our disposal and that of our hosting company. We have high security on our servers because of a relationship we have with American Express and mileagemanager.com. In fact, we use the very same data house that American Express uses for some of their services. We know the security standards are very high for this.

We also know that the standards of the members of FlyerTalk are very high and continue to run FlyerTalk with these standards in mind. We've never - and will never release the back end of FlyerTalk to any other party than ourselves. We've been approached many times for such, usually in the form of an email relationship. But we remain commited to the Community which we all call FlyerTalk and despite the financial lure, will never make that decision against the principles in which we founded FlyerTalk.

I think that the tech crowd that calls FlyerTalk home would actually urge you to rotate your user password just as you might your bank or other personal passwords. Identity theft is not a pleasant thing for any member - and my staff and I stand by to assist any of you in changing your passwords if you have any doubt to your own identity security on FlyerTalk.

There have been a few assertions by members how this may have happened - I have no knowledge that any of these assertions are true. And I would urge any member to not contribute to rumors though they may be fun to read. If you want something fun to read, we offer more than 2.5 million threads about miles, points and travel (OK, a few tens of thousands are about sex, politics, religion, damm lies and whatever Gaucho100K (smilie here) wants us to post in the OMNI foum).

A few members for good reason have urged me to close all threads related to this incident because they have become a bit of a 'Hall of Champions' of words among some members. It would be easy to do, but beyond that, there actually lies some very good dialog. I think I'll allow these threads to exist and try to channel the way in which some members have focused on each other rather than stifle the dialog. It's sometimes from these types of dialogs that members really make a name for themselves. For instance, prior to this, I was not all that familiar to the posting content and style of attorney28. But he seems quite knowledgeable and I'm paying attention.

I hope this helps any member seeking some background on this issue. Thanks underpressue, for asking my input.