(Washington) American justice announced on Friday the decommissioning of one of the main exchange sites dedicated to hackers in the world, called BreachForums, and the arrest of its founder.
Conor Fitzpatrick, a 20-year-old resident of New York State, was arraigned on March 15 and brought before a federal judge in Virginia on Friday who served him with a charge of “organized computer fraud,” a chief punishable by 5 years in prison.
He is accused of having created the BreachForums site in March 2022 to facilitate exchanges between hackers, with a section dedicated to the sale of stolen personal data or hacking tools, another to tutorials devoted to intrusion methods, etc
According to court documents, the young man, who used the pseudonym Pompompurin, had opened this platform after the closure by the authorities of a first site of this style, entitled RaidForums.
“We continue to bring down key players in the cybercrime ecosystem,” Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Like Raidforums, “BreachForums bridged the gap between hackers selling stolen data, and buyers eager to profit from it,” she added.
Another offered in April 2022 the stolen data to 8,000 customers of an American internet service company, including 1,900 bank card numbers.
Beyond the contact, Conor Fitzpatrick is suspected of having served as an intermediary for certain transactions by passing cryptocurrencies and stolen files on his site.
After his arrest, he, according to court documents, admitted to creating and running the site and said he earned $1,000 a day on average, which he reinvested in maintaining BreachForums and buying other domains.
This operation “is a significant disruption to the cybercriminal landscape that will impact for months, before threat actors respond and adapt,” cybersecurity expert Alexander Leslie commented on Twitter.
