BreachForums Closed Due to Fears That Law Enforcement Officers Gained Access to the Servers

BreachForums closed
Written by Emma Davis

The hacker resource Breach (BreachForums) was closed after the arrest of its founder and administrator, known under the nickname Pompompurin. The remaining site administrator, Baphomet, said that law enforcement could gain access to the resource’s servers and Pompompurin’s machine, which means that it is unsafe to continue working.

Let me remind you that at the beginning of this week, American law enforcement agencies reported the arrest of a New Yorker who, they believe, is the owner and founder of the BreachForums hacker forum, and is known online as Pompompurin.

According to court documents, the detainee was charged with conspiracy to induce individuals to sell devices for unauthorized access. It was also reported that at the time of his arrest, the suspect admitted to FBI agents that his real name was Conor Brian FitzPatric and that he was Pompompurin, the owner of the Breach Forums hack forum.

BreachForums has been the largest data breach hack forum in recent times and is commonly used by hackers and ransomware to leak information. The resource was launched by Pompompurin last year after the FBI shut down the RaidForums hacking site.

Personally, Pompompurin and other members of BreachForums are involved in many high-profile hacks and data leaks, including the data theft of millions of Robinhood users, the data leak of 5.4 million Twitter users, the recent attacks on Acer, Activision, and so on.

Immediately after Pompompurin’s arrest, BreachForums administrators assured that even in the absence of the founder, the site would continue to work as usual, since the admins had full access to its infrastructure. However, now the situation has changed.

BreachForums closed

According to Bleeping Computer, in recent days, Baphomet, the administrator who remained in charge, has published a series of messages in which he stated that he was shutting down the site and moving it to a new infrastructure, protected from possible compromise by law enforcement agencies.

Baphomet wrote that the migration process is slow, as admins are trying to maintain operational security (opsec) and do not want their identities to be revealed by the authorities.

The original plan was to move the site to a new, untraceable infrastructure that would allow the community to continue using BreachForums. But now Baphomet has released a “latest update” and said that, according to its information, law enforcement officers have probably already gained access to Pompompurin’s car.

BreachForums closed

The fact is that when the BreachForums infrastructure was disabled, the old CDN server remained on the network, which hosted not very important data.

During the migration, I checked to see if anything suspicious was going on that could be of concern. One of the servers I checked was our old CDN server mentioned above. Looks like someone logged in on March 19 at 1:34 AM EST before I logged into the server. Unfortunately, this leads us to the conclusion that it is likely that someone has access to Pom’s machine. Our servers are never used by anyone else, so someone had to know the credentials to be able to log in. Now I feel like I’m in a situation where nothing can be considered safe, be it our configurations, source code, or information about our users – the list is endless.Baphomet writes.

Fearing that Pompompurin’s devices are now under the control of law enforcement and have access to the infrastructure of the resource, Baphomet has decided to close BreachForums permanently, allowing community members to choose where they want to go next.

Journalists note that the site’s Telegram channel is still working, and Baphomet plans to discuss with the owners of other hack forums the potential possibility of creating something new.

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About the author

Emma Davis

I'm writer and content manager (a short time ago completed a bachelor degree in Marketing from the Gustavus Adolphus College). For now, I have a deep drive to study cyber security.

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