The FBI arrested Conor Brian FitzPatrick who is believed to be the owner and administrator of the hacking forum BreachForums on March 15. According to court documents, Fitzpatrick allegedly confessed to FBI special agent John Longmire that he did in fact run the forum.
Longmire addressed the issue by testifying that Fitzpatrick using the alias ‘pompompourin’ was the owner and administrator of the forum. Fitzpatrick was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud and his bail was set at $300,000 which was paid for by his parents.
For the time being, Fitzpatrick has surrendered his documents and is only allowed to travel within the Southern and Eastern districts of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia for court-related tasks. As reported by Bloomberg, he’s set to appear before the District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia on March 24.
BreachForums started as a resurrection for RaidForums on the dark web shortly after the latter’s demise in 2022 after the FBI seized its domain and shut down operations. RaidForums specialised in selling stolen data from attacks and breaches. BreachForums followed in its footsteps before becoming a popular choice for threat actors to announce attacks and stolen data archives.
Fitzpatrick himself was a high-profile member of RaidForums and has been involved in several high-profile company breaches including stealing customer data from Robinhood, sending fake emails using a flaw in FBI’s Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal and exploiting a Twitter API vulnerability to confirm email addresses and other sensitive information of 5.4 million Twitter users.
In the meantime, another forum administrator over at BreachFourms claims that the site would continue operations as usual operating in its current capacity while Fitzpatrick is away. The admin also stated that they have full access to the site’s infrastructure and will continue operating the forum. However, the site was down at the time of writing throwing a bad gateway 502 error.
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