Dear readers,

As you may have heard, an unauthorized party illegally obtained and disclosed personally identifiable information and related credit card data of some of our members.

We deeply regret that this event has occurred, and we are working to prevent it from happening again.

Our highest concern is the impact that this has had on you, our loyal members and friends.

As a result and at our expense, we have taken measures to provide our members whose personally identifiable information may have been compromised with access to CSID, a leading provider of global identity protection and fraud detection solutions and technologies.

We have arranged to provide one year of CSID’s coverage to you at no cost. Members, please take advantage of this service.

Here’s a video featuring Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, discussing our members’ CSID coverage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOeIxnzgXmA

Should you have any questions regarding the coverage or the sign up process, please contact CSID’s Identity Care Center at the phone numbers listed below, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, or e-mail support@csid.com.

As part of our ongoing investigation, we have also decided to delay the launching of our website until a thorough review and adjustment by outside experts can be completed.

We expect this to take approximately a week, but it might take longer – please bear with us as we recover from this unfortunate event.

In the meantime, we will not be deterred from doing what we do best: providing our customers with top-notch geopolitical analysis.

Therefore, while our website is being tested we will be sending geopolitical analysis to our members via email. If you do not wish to have our analytical content emailed to you, please contact us at feedback@stratfor.com and we will remove you from that distribution list.

Please also use this email address to let us know your thoughts about this situation.

We want to hear from you.

To say we wish this hadn’t happened is a massive understatement.

As I have stated in prior emails to you, I sincerely apologize for these unfortunate events. Our investigation and coordination with law enforcement is ongoing, and we will continue to update you as more details become available.

Sincerely,

George Friedman

What about those who aren't members of Stratfor and who never bought anything, but whose email addresses were in their database because they received occasional free articles? In another Facebook post, Mr. Friedman writes:

Again, if your email address was in our database, you’ll be receiving the information.

On a related note, the 3 million Stratfor e-mails (now supposedly 5 million) that the hackers have said they are releasing are still being processed. So far, all that's been released is a list of topics people should search for when they do come out.