Premium WordPress theme developer WooThemes hacked

WooThemes is a bona fide South African startup success story. The premium WordPress theme developer was already raking in over US$2 million in sales in 2010. The latest news from WooThemes is less rosy. Adriaan “Adii” Pienaar, WooThemes co-founder released a statement today, confirming that WooThemes were the target of a recent “very malicious & severe hack, which has been the reason for WooThemes.com being offline for this time.”

Pienaar notes that despite possible data loss related to recent user accounts, no sensitive or confidential data were seized and that users’ encrypted credit card details are safe and hosted elsewhere.

For the time being, new product development has been shelved as WooThemes’s priority is to recover data. Following that, WooThemes will make their technical support forum available again.

WooThemes launched a service called WooCommerce last year, a plugin that lets users turn their WordPress site into an e-commerce storefront. The service offers multiple payment gateway options, settings for configuring shipping rates, coupon support, email templates, a reports panel to track sales and performance and more.

At the end of last year WooThemes reportedly had more than 50 000 paying customers who have downloaded its free themes over 800,000 times.

Pienaar promises that things should be back to normal soon and recommends checking the blog for the latest on the WooThemes team’s recovery attempts.