Antivirus firm Avast! has 'fessed up to a breach.

The small upside is that the mess only impacts the company's forums. As the company's CEO Vincent Steckler has blogged “Less than 0.2% of our 200 million users were affected. No payment, license, or financial systems or other data was compromised.”

Don't click away to another story yet: user names, email addresses and hashed passwords were compromised, so Steckler says “If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords immediately.”

The CEO goes on to say Avast! has no idea how the breach occurred, but that “we do believe that the attack just occurred and we detected it essentially immediately.” The company plans to rebuild the forum on a different software platform. ®