- Conor Fitzpatrick, aka Pompompurin, was resentenced to three years in prison for operating BreachForums and possessing child sexual abuse material
- BreachForums, which held over 14 billion records and had 330,000 members, repeatedly resurfaced despite law enforcement efforts
- The forum is now offline, with its maintainers and other cybercriminal groups like Lapsus$ and Scattered Spider choosing to “go dark.”
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the person behind the infamous BreachForums underground hacking forum, will be spending time in jail after his initial sentence was scrapped.
In March 2023, Fitzpatrick (alias Pompompurin) was arrested for operating BreachForums, and was accused of access device conspiracy, access device solicitation, and possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
In January 2024, Fitzpatrick pleaded guilty on all three accounts, and was sentenced to 17 days in jail, as well as 20 years of supervised release.
Going dark
However, prosecutors appealed, arguing the sentence was far too lenient given the scale of his crimes. The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit agreed, stating that “a 17-day sentence does not fulfill those required sentencing purposes and therefore was substantively unreasonable”.
As a result, Fitzpatrick was resentenced – his earlier sentencing overturned and replaced with three years in federal prison.
“Conor Fitzpatrick personally profited from the sale of vast quantities of stolen information, ranging from private personal information to commercial data,” said US Attorney Erik S. Siebert for the Eastern District of Virginia.
BreachForums emerged in March 2022, from the rubble of the previously dismantled RaidForums, a similar marketplace that was shut down by the police. According to The Hacker News, BreachForums had some 330,000 members at its peak, and held more than 14 billion individual records.
The police tried to shut it down on numerous occasions, but the forum kept popping up. Baphomet, the admin that took over when Fitzpatrick was arrested, was also arrested in 2023, leaving the forum to ShinyHunters, a group of cybercriminals responsible for some of the most devastating data breaches in recent history.
At press time, BreachForums is offline, with its maintainers also saying they wanted to “go dark”. Other groups that also went dark in the last couple of weeks included Lapsus$ and Scattered Spider.
Via The Hacker News
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