On March 16, 2022, about a month after the FBI took down a popular online forum for buying and selling stolen data known as RaidForums, another criminal marketplace quickly sprung up to take its place. The title of first post on the new forum known as BreachForums simply said “Welcome.”
Over the next year, the forum administered by “pompompurin” would post hacked data related to approximately 14 billion people globally, according to the FBI, and become one of the most prolific cybercrime forums in the world. It hosted breaches that included data related to 7 million Robinhood customers in November 2021, 23 terabytes of Shanghai National Police data in June 2022 and, more recently, roughly 60,000 records from the D.C. Health Link insurance exchange, exposing the personal details of members of Congress, their families and staffs and tens of thousands of other Washington area residents.