Law enforcement agencies around the world have orchestrated a victory in the fight against cybercrime by taking down one of the world’s largest hacking forums.
BreachForums, a notorious marketplace for stolen data, was seized by authorities on Wednesday, according to a message on its website.
BREACHForums is controlled by the FBI
With the assistance of international partners, the FBI and Department of Justice have shut down the site.
The message describes how authorities are “reviewing” the site’s “backend data” and invites victims and anyone with information about BreachForums’ cybercriminal activity to contact the FBI via Telegram, email or online.
BreachForums has been taken down just days after a hacker sold material on the site, which he claimed was stolen during a breach of the Europol portal.
Could the timing of BreachForums’ closure be that the material stolen from Europol constituted a serious breach?
Until this week, BreachForums was publicly known as a marketplace for criminals to trade stolen access devices, identification tools, hacking tools, compromised databases, and other illicit services. The site, run by the ShinyHunters hacker group, was founded in June 2023, a month after its early version was disrupted by the arrest of its creator and administrator, Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, aka “pompompurin.”
Fitzpatrick, 21, was sentenced in January to serve time and 20 years of supervised release, with the first year banned from using the Internet and requiring surveillance software to be installed on his computer.
Fitzpatrick created BreachForums after its predecessor, RaidForums, shut down in April 2022 and its alleged administrator, Diogo Santos Coelho, was arrested.
Have you noticed a trend? Hackmarkets were disrupted, so-called administrators arrested, and then new versions of the forums sprang up to fill the void.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone clones the BreachForums market and provides a forum for cybercriminals to illegally trade stolen information. But anyone participating in such sites should think carefully. Law enforcement agencies have a history of obtaining data from such criminal markets and searching for details that could lead them to identify users.
Editorial Note: The opinions expressed in this article and other guest author articles are those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the views of Tripwire.
