Data of 478,000 RaidForums members leaked online

RaidForums, a now-defunct clandestine hacker forum known primarily for its role in data breaches and trading, was a hotbed for hackers routinely engaged in nefarious activities such as ransomware operations.

Some members of this illicit community were involved in data theft, while others exploited cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to procure stolen information, subsequently utilizing this data for targeted phishing, cryptocurrency scams, and telecommunication fraud.

In April 2022, the International Criminal Police Organization successfully dismantled RaidForums, apprehending its administrator, Omnipotent, along with two of its members.

Thereafter, a new hacker forum, BreachedForums, emerged as a successor, with former RaidForums participants migrating en masse to continue their data trafficking operations. Unfazed by the arrest of their administrator, they simply shifted their activities to a new venue.

In March of the current year, BreachedForums was similarly annihilated by the FBI, paving the way for yet another forum, Exposed, the central character in today’s narrative.

For reasons unknown, an administrator of Exposed has leaked a substantial portion of member information from RaidForums, totaling 478,870 members. The published database includes user names, email addresses, hashed passwords, registration times, and various activity details. The data spans from March 20, 2015, to September 24, 2020, and appears to have been exported from MySQL.

Impotent, the administrator who released the database, claimed it had been edited to exclude a small portion of member data. Veteran members of RaidForums confirmed the authenticity of the database, verifying the presence of their own information.

At present, the origin of the database and the rationale for its extraction remain elusive. Impotent, the publisher, alleges knowledge of the data source but refuses to divulge any information.

Following the disclosure of the database, law enforcement and security researchers now have the means to track certain hackers, provided they have not taken adequate precautions to obscure their identities.

Entities such as the FBI and Interpol would likely express significant interest in this database. Their cybercrime investigation departments collate various databases, striving to trace digital malefactors back to their real-world identities, culminating in their arrest.

Via: bleepingcomputer