I have bad news for you bonestructure hacking is dead easy if you have one or more trojans lurking in your system. Try using a firewall like Blackice Defender which not only gives you the IP from where attacks are being launched but the type of attacks. The most common of these tend to be SubSeven and Back Orifice pings and a range of other probes to see if your computers ports are open and amenable to allowing the hacker in. My record is 47 such probes on my system in a five-hour web session. Experienced hackers can trawl millions of computers on the net in one session. (have a look at http://www.networkice.com/ for lots of info and links on the topic) If you have a trojan in your system and no firewall and the hacker comes after you the chances are you won't even know it happened. And you can pick up a trojan from any download on the net. I understand it is now even technically possible to hide small programs, virus's and trojans in graphics data, i.e. a picture. Anti-Virus programs are generally poor at spotting trojans and very few ordinary surfers use specialised anti-trojan or trojan hunting programs. On the question of Aureate gathering info on surfers, maybe you are right and should not worry, but in some cases this data might be used against surfers in the future. But, there are many countries in the world that have far less liberal laws than e.g. the USA. Certain extremist regiemes imprison, torture and even execute people for looking at things that are considered legal and "normal" in the USA and much of Europe such as adult graphic sites like Renderotica. Ask Amnesty International about this if you want the evidence. There is no guarentee that Aureate's illegally gathered surfer's IP addresses and surfing information habits would not fall into the hands of the security and police authorities of such regiemes and have serious consequences for many ordinary people (after all the manufacturers of over 300 software products already get this stuff from Aureate - some security headache!). The info could also be used for Blackmail purposes by individuals or intelligence services. I object to such illegal information gathering and so do many others. On a final note you may not have to worry about your "Aureate profile" but if you do not have a good firewall I would advise you not to keep any sensitive personal information such as financial/bank details, credit card information or anything of that nature in an open folder on your computer. Use a good encryption program for it or store it in a removable disk. Then again maybe I am just a little bit paranoid having lost my system to a hacker last Christmas. STORM