Ops should reimburse users, but only partially - if someone is too stupid to leave 0.5+ BTC on pool ran by two (doesn´t matter how honest) guys, where no one can expect robust security platform, deserves nothing more than loose it. During 6 months of mining I lost coins in various scams (Unocs, Orbit Coin, PhenixEx..) and I learned one thing - You are on enemy territory and if You loose, it was by your mistake so blame no one but You.
aTriz and nearmiss did great job here, so stop complain and try to be supportive.
I will be a lot more supportive if I receive my coins back in a timely manner (if I receive them at all). Sure, any website can be hacked. It is hard to pay for proper security, and even that often isn't enough. However, not only did Hashcows allow a hacker to access all the users' account passwords and PINS, they didn't even have a failsafe in place for if/when the site was compromised.
The theft was ongoing for two full HOURS before withdraws were halted. Are you saying that the site should not have considered adding a flagging system when the withdraw rate from it's users shot up 1,000% all at once that could have at least stopped SOME of the thefts? This would have reduced the losses and made it more likely that the smaller amount of lost coins could be refunded. You can blame people for not withdrawing every day if you want, but it seems like (to me at least) that when you have tons of people who typically withdraw only every few days/weeks and/or they have their auto payout threshold set to a "high" figure, that Hashcows should have halted withdraws MUCH faster than two hours later. All those occational withdrawing users all didn't decide to lower their thresholds and pull their funds at the same time and all to the SAME ADDRESS.
Major security breach that users had no part in their information being changed and coins stolen. Site had no early warning alarms in place to catch blatantly obvious theft occurring. Many users paid a premium to the Hashcows owners for them to autotrade the coins they mined, on top of the regular mining fees paid to the site. These funds were apparently never used to increase DDOS protection to levels seen at other comparable sized pools, as Hashcows always had a lot of downtime, pretty much on a daily basis.
Where is the part where these guys did a great job? They didn't run a charity. They provided services for a price. I would say the price paid certainly did not match the quality of service.
At the very least these guys should reimburse all mining and autotrading fees accumulated for every affected user. Doesn't really seem fair for them to keep the profits they made from miners/autotraders when they allowed all of what was actually left to the miners to get stolen.In reality, they should refund all lost coins, but I will be very surprised if this happens.
