Nearly half a million members of the famous hacker forum have their information publicly disclosed

The member data of RaidForums – once considered one of the most famous black hat hacker forums in the world – has just been made public by the administrator of another hacker forum.

Accordingly, the RaidForums public database was posted on the Exposed page, which security researchers describe as an emerging forum “wanting to fill the void” after BreachForums (also a forum for forum for black hat hackers) was closed recently. An administrator of Exposed, (commonly known as “Impotent”), posted public RaidForums user data online.

According to the Bleepingcomputer page, the RaidForums dataset is in an SQL format file with a capacity of more than 370 MB, containing registration information of more than 478,000 accounts registered on from 2015 to 2020, including usernames, email addresses, encrypted password, account registration date, and more related information. The administrator added that some of the user’s information has been deleted, although it is not clear how much or what is the reason behind making this data public.

RaidForums, launched in 2015, was once considered one of the largest black hat hacker forums in the world. It is used by cybercriminals to mainly buy and sell stolen databases.

Specifically, some cybercriminals will hack into websites or access database servers to exploit security holes, thereby stealing customer information. These same hackers will then sell the above data on RaidForums to other hackers, who will use them for malicious purposes such as distributing malicious code, financial fraud or cryptocurrency.

In April 2022, the US Department of Justice announced the seizure of the RaidForums website and infrastructure as part of an international law enforcement operation. The administrator of RaidForums, known as “Omnipotent”, and two accomplices were also arrested. Prosecutors said that before the forum was confiscated, RaidForums contained hundreds of databases of stolen data, including more than 10 billion unique records of individuals and organizations for sale.

As for the recently leaked RaidForums data, the data itself is likely already in the hands of US and international law enforcement agencies. However, they can help security researchers investigate RaidForums’ history, including building hacker profiles and identifying threat actors.

US law enforcement agencies also recently announced that they had arrested a man believed to be “Pompompurin”, the administrator of the BreachForums forum, which was created shortly after the collapse of RaidForums to do a ‘new haven’ for black hat hackers to conduct data trading.

Reference BleepingComputer/TechCrunch