- BreachForums taken offline after CCITIC abuse reports
- Admin announces resignation and seeks new leadership
- Forum Trust Eroded After January 2026 324,000 User Database Leak
BreachForums, one of the most popular underground forums for sharing malware, stolen data and more – was taken down. Now it looks like the admin is giving up and looking for someone to pass the torch to.
Over the weekend, the Cyber Counter-Intelligence Threat Investigation Consortium (CCITIC) posted on LinkedIn saying that both the clearnet and Tor versions of BreachForums showed a 502 – Bad Gateway error.
CCITIC is a non-profit that investigates cyber security threats and assists law enforcement with takedown efforts, and the organization said it succeeded in identifying the upstream servers behind BreachForums, all hosted on DigitalOcean (ASN 14061) in Frankfurt am Main data center. After filing abuse reports, all three servers were taken offline.
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Admin stops
This is hardly BreachForums’ first rodeo. It was seized twice by law enforcement — once in June 2023, and then again in May 2024. Each time it managed to bounce back, and it likely will again. However, it may be under new management.
After the shutdown and altercation, the forum administrator posted a message on the website saying they were quitting and looking for someone else to take over.
“It’s time for me to say goodbye – but not completely,” the post reads. “However, at this moment I must take a step back. Despite this, I will continue to support BreachForums in any way I can, whenever possible. For this reason, we are now looking for a responsible person or group willing to take over the management and ongoing support of the forum.”
CCITIC suggests that the forum may never recover as things have changed. “In January 2026, its own database of ~324,000 users was leaked,” the organization said. “The ecosystem is rupturing and trust among threat actors is collapsing.”
“You don’t have to be the FBI to act. Rigorous OSINT work, backend server identification, a well-documented abuse report sent to the right hosting provider – and a cybercriminal forum goes down.”
Via Cyber news
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