Re: the hacker "article" see here: http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/07/30/theres-more-than-one-way-to-store-a-password-perlmonks-hacked/ They claim not to have any further malevolent purposes:

There is a really simple reason we owned PerlMonks: we couldn’t resist more than 50,000 unencrypted programmer passwords. That’s right, unhashed. Just sitting in the database. From which they save convenient backups for us. In case you guys are worried, we did NOT backdoor dozens of your public Perl projects. Honest. Why would we want to do that?