PixelCove News

[Liz]

Rumors about a data leak

We have had some reports about a leak of the UGC dataset. While we appreciate people coming to us with this as it may affect some of our users, we would like to clarify a few things.

First of all, and most importantly, there are no risks for PixelCove directly. We comply with relevant security standards when it comes to storing data. All our users have had to sign up for a new account, and as long as you aren't using the same password as you were using on UGC, your PixelCove account is safe. For extra security, be sure to turn on Two Factor Authentication on the Security page, which can be found in your user menu.

Secondly, this leak appears to be from before UGC got breached initially. They increased their security afterwards, and while we cannot rule out any actions from its staff members, we are absolutely certain that this data was not acquired through Luminance. If you'd like to inspect the Luminance code yourself, you can do so on Empornium's GitHub page.

Thirdly, we would like to clarify where we stand in relation to UGC. While a few key members of our staff team started up PixelCove in response to UGC going down, we could not agree on a direct takeover of UGC. We did obtain approval from the original sysops to use a backup of the dataset to make the transition as easy as possible. We then specifically chose not to import all the data, but rather to start over and allow those that had a UGC account to sign up if they wanted to do so. Luckily, we managed to keep a part of the UGC community and spirit alive, with a staff team that we are confident can take care of any that have been put out on the street by other trackers going down. We are happy to represent what was good about UGC, without the inexperience of some of the old staff members holding us back, but stating that we are in any way directly related to UGC at this point would be incorrect.

Hopefully this cleared up any worries and/or rumors that may have been going around. We have had a very successful first year, and we hope to keep growing into a beautiful community with an abundance of content. We have some great things planned in the near future, so stay tuned!

Thread: Rumors about a data leak