W20-year-old New York resident Norman Fitzpatrick was arrested March 15 and brought before a federal judge in Virginia today, where he was charged with “organized computer fraud,” a charge punishable by up to five years in prison.
The suspect is accused of having created the BreachForums website in March 2022 to facilitate exchanges between ‘hackers’, with sections such as the one dedicated to the sale of stolen personal data, information theft tools or tutorials on intrusion methods.
According to court documents, the young man, who used the pseudonym Pompompurin, opened this platform after the authorities closed a first similar site, called RaidForums.
“We continue to take down key players in the cybercrime ecosystem,” Deputy Minister of Justice Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
Like Raidforums, “BreachForums has bridged the gap between hackers selling stolen data and buyers looking to profit from it,” he added.
One of the users posted the names and contact details of 200 million hacked users of a major US social network on January 4. Court documents don’t specify which one, but according to several specialist websites, Twitter was the target.
Another offered, in April 2022, the stolen data to 8,000 customers of an American internet service company, including 1,900 bank card numbers.
Conor Fitzpatrick is also suspected of having acted as an intermediary for certain transactions, passing cryptocurrencies and stolen files through his page.
After the arrest, according to court documents, he admitted to having created and managed the website.
This operation “is a major disruption of the cyberscape that will have an impact for months before threat actors react and adapt,” cybersecurity expert Alexander Leslie commented on Twitter.
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