An international law enforcement operation has shut down the notorious BreachForums hacker forum known for leaking and selling stolen data. This marks the second time in just over a year that authorities have taken down the illicit platform.
The operation, conducted on May 15, 2024, involved the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) and enforcement agencies in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Iceland. As part of the operation, BreachForums’s Telegram channel and a Telegram channel of Baphomet, the current administrator of the platform, were seized.
“This Telegram chat is under the control of the FBI. The BreachForums website has been taken down by the FBI and DOJ with assistance from international partners. We are reviewing the site's backend data,” the FBI message reads.
The first takedown of BreachForums took place in June 2023, following the arrest of its owner, Conor Fitzpatrick aka “Pompompurin.” Fitzpatrick, who has been a well-known player in cybercriminal underground, created BreachForums after the FBI dismantled RaidForums, one of the world’s biggest hacker forums to buy and sell stolen data. In less than 12 months, BreachForums gained popularity with hackers and ransomware gangs and developed into top cybercriminal website, with 225,000 registered members and 740,000 posts.
Some reports have linked Fitzpatrick to the 2021 Robinhood breach, the massive Twitter leak in November of 2022. The BreachForums owner is also said to be responsible for hacking FBI servers to send out fake cybersecurity warnings from the agency’s email address. Pompompurin was arrested in March 2023, and sentenced to 20 years of supervised release in January 2024.
Despite the initial shutdown, BreachForums quickly reappeared under new management and continued to facilitate illegal transactions involving compromised credentials, stolen access devices, hacking tools, breached databases, and more.
Authorities have yet to make official statement regarding the shutdown, so details surrounding the operation are unclear at the moment. However, the ShinyHunters cybercrime gang, the alleged owners of BreachForums, reported that BreachForums’s admin Baphomet was allegedly arrested.