You’ve probably heard of hackers trying to sell illegally acquired data on forums of like-minded individuals. But have you ever heard of the database of a hacker forum getting leaked on another hacker forum? Such is the irony when the database containing details of RaidForum members got posted on a relatively new hacker forum called Exposed.
BleepingComputer reports that the new forum, launched earlier this month, leaked the member database of RaidForums, exposing them to fellow hackers, as well as possibly law enforcement. The database contains the registration info of 478,870 members, from usernames and registration dates to emails and hashed passwords. Though only users who registered between 20 March 2015 and 24 September 2020 were listed, likely indicating when the data dump was created. That being said, the poster says that it is unknown why the dump was created in the first place, and that some members may have been removed.
RaidForums has quite the history behind it for a hacker forum. Having been notorious already for being the selling, or dumping, spot for hackers, it was seized by US law enforcement agencies in April of 2022. With it being shut down, its denizes migrated over to BreachForums to continue what they’ve been doing, until it got shut down in March earlier this year. So it’s ironic that Exposed, the new forum meant to fill the void left behind by RaidForums and BreachForums, would expose the details of hackers who visit it.
With law enforcement agencies likely already having access to this database during the initial raid on RaidForums, this will likely not be new info to them. But on the flip side, the report notes that this data dump can be “useful for security researchers who commonly build profiles of threat actors”. Hopefully this translates to more malware being discovered, and less people falling victim.
(Source: BleepingComputer)
