HashCows is one of those mining pools that auto-switches coins based on profitability. Unfortunately for its users, the site was just hacked a few hours ago. According to “nearmiss”, a site admin at HashCows,
“There’s been a breach this afternoon with a number of users reporting payout addresses being changed and manual payouts being triggered to the new address. All payouts have been disabled and we are working on determining the scope of the issue. While its unlikely passwords have been compromised (and nothing is stored plain text in the db anyways), its not a bad practice to assume the worst and change passwords anyways.
40.8 total BTC has been lost. We can’t really comment much further on account statuses until we gather data on the full picture. Obviously with the time of year, we all have commitments outside, but we are working every spare moment we’ve got.
I advise people to stop by the irc channel if possible, where live discussions can happen and up to date news provided.
The cows apologize to everyone involved, its a terrible time of year to wake up to such things. There will be 0% fees on anything earned as of now (keeping in mind payout is disabled for the time being).”
This is terrible news for all users involved and the future of the site is unknown. The situation is currently being discussed on the official Bitcointalk thread and IRC (Server: irc.freenode.org Channel: #hashcows).