Non-profit org claims BreachForums takedown

Infamous cybercrime marketplace BreachForums was alleged to have been disrupted by the non-profit organization Cyber Counter-Intelligence Threat Investigation Consortium, with the forum's onion and clearnet sites displaying a "502 Bad Gateway" error, according to Cybernews.

Taking down BreachForums entailed the discovery of upstream servers supporting the site that were hosted by a Frankfurt-based DigitalOcean data center and the subsequent filing of formal abuse complaints, which led DigitalOcean to deactivate the servers, said CCITIC.

"And this is not a one-off. In just 9 days, CCITIC had already secured 3 takedowns of the Lapsus$ website, before turning its sights on BreachForums. The pace is set," the organization said.

Earlier in the year, a large dataset containing information on hundreds of thousands of BreachForums users was leaked online. The exposed data included account and technical details that could potentially assist authorities in identifying individuals involved in illegal activities. Despite being shut down multiple times by law enforcement since 2022, the marketplace has repeatedly resurfaced under new domains. It is still uncertain whether it will recover again after this latest outage.