You could say StudiVZ, the German Facebook clone, has a few problems on its hands – and some unwelcome publicity.

Back in August Facebook officially became Germany’s biggest social network, increasing reach by more than 50% from March to July 2009 taking it to 6.2 million unique users in Germany. By contrast StudiVZ had 4.28 million uniques.

Then StudiVZ became the subject of some high profile hacks which showed up its lax attitude to security. In particular was that by a 20 year old man who used crawler software to harvest detailed user information from all of the “VZ” sites (owned by VZ-Netzwerke), copying 48,000 profiles in just four hours.