TNT Village, Italy's most prominent torrent site has been compromised by hackers. Intimate details of the site's operations including 50,000 usernames, passwords and email addresses have been leaked out onto the Internet. The site has taken precautionary measures but concerned users should change their passwords immediately.

One of the problems with running a website or any Internet presence is the constant threat of malicious attacks. Almost everyone will recall the terrible mauling experienced by MediaDefender after their confidential emails leaked onto the Internet, and since then many anti-piracy groups and related companies have felt the wrath of hackers.

But of course, being hacked isn’t the sole preserve of these organizations, it can happen to file-sharing sites too. In November 2008 a hacker tried to gain control of Torrentz.com and at the beginning of June NowTorrents had its own problems.

Today we bring news of another sizable hack, this time affecting Italy’s most prominent BitTorrent site, TNT Village. A hacker targeted the 50,000 member site and made off with the site’s database.

The admin of TNT Village explains: “A son of a bitch was able to discover my password. With it in recent days he has removed the TNT database. I then proceeded to change my password but in the meantime he/they had taken some sensitive data to users, and yesterday they were made public.”

Indeed, a torrent of the stolen data has appeared on various BitTorrent indexes. The data contained within is largely in Italian but a source with an interest in security breaches told TorrentFreak that the archive contains very sensitive information.

The site’s database schema, the actual database with around 50,000 usernames, passwords and emails, a list of site donors and private messages have all been leaked.

The site has taken steps to limit the damage but concerned users should change their passwords immediately, at the very least.