BreachForums website just had its domain suspended

Hacker marketplace BreachForums had its domain suspended. The website’s predecessor, RaidForums, suffered a similar fate just before being taken down.

One of BreachForums’ admins, a user by the alias pompompurin, announced that the website’s domain has been suspended and relocated elsewhere.

The online forum primarily serves as a marketplace to sell often illegally obtained data. Major data leaks are usually announced there, such as Australia’s second-largest wireless carrier Optus, or Shanghai police data leak with information on one billion Chinese citizens.

It’s not yet clear why BreachForums got suspended. However, the suspension might have originated from the forums’ service providers and law enforcement agencies.

While publicly available WHOIS lookup tool says that the website is currently for sale, that is not the case. BreachForums admins pompompurin reached out to Cybernews saying that that the domain is still registered by its original owners, "just in a suspended state" where the owners "cannot edit or modify it."

The admin told Cybernews they've reached out to a domain name registrar, a business that handles the reservation of domain names, for clarification.

While owners of the hacker forum relocated the forum to a new domain, the suspension eerily resembles the chain of events that killed off the website’s predecessor RaidForums.

At first, the forum’s website was suspended, and eventually, it was completely shut down due to interference from various governments unhappy with the continuous sharing of stolen data.