Members of Hacker Forum Suffer Data Breach with PII Posted on Another Hacker Forum

Nearly 480,000 members of the now defunct, dark web hacker forum RaidForums got a taste of their own medicine when their personal information was posted on another dark web site for posting and selling stolen data.

The RaidForums website was a forum for hackers and fraudsters to post or obtain data compromised in data breaches, sometimes given for free and sometimes for sale. The site was shut down by an international law enforcement operation in April 2022 along with the arrest of three people involved with the hacker forum site.

Shutting down these hacker forums continues to be game of whack-a-mole and yields just temporary success. RaidForums was quickly replaced by a new forum called Breach, which was shut down in March 2023 before the next forum, Exposed, took its place. Exposed is the forum that has now leaked the data of 478,870 RaidForum members, likely in attempt to gain notoriety and fill the new void.

The exposed data includes usernames, email address, hashed passwords, registration dates and other information. It includes member information for RaidForum users who registered between March 2015 and September 2020. Approximately 1 percent of the records were removed before publishing, likely representing members who are involved with or have relationships with the hackers behind the new hacker forum.

While most data breaches implicate consumers who did no wrong, it’s hard to feel sorry for those impacted by this breach. It also corroborates the idea that in the hacker community there is no honor among thieves.