235/68 Monday, June 30, 2025
France’s cybercrime unit, the Brigade de Lutte contre la Cybercriminalité (BL2C), has arrested five individuals believed to be senior members of BreachForums—a notorious dark web marketplace known for trafficking in leaked data, hacking tools, and breached databases.
Among the four most recently arrested suspects are individuals known by the aliases Depressed, Hollow, Noct, and Shiny Hunters. The fifth suspect, a British national using the handle IntelBroker, had been arrested earlier in February, with details of the arrest only recently made public.
According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the fifth suspect has been identified as Kai West, 25 years old. He is accused of offering for sale data stolen in over 41 hacking incidents, and of distributing leaked data for free on 117 other occasions between 2023 and 2025. The DOJ stated that West and his co-conspirators allegedly sought to profit more than $2 million USD, causing at least $25 million USD in damages to victims. The U.S. government is currently pursuing extradition to bring West to trial.
French authorities allege that the arrested group was involved in hacking various national organizations, including telecom provider SFR, the French Football Federation, and the France Travail employment agency. The latest iteration of BreachForums—believed to have been operated by this group—was shut down in April 2025 after being compromised via a zero-day vulnerability in its forum software.
Previously, the original BreachForums was seized in May last year after a user posted data allegedly stolen from Europol’s portal. The forum was originally founded by a hacker known as “pompompurin”, real name Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, who is also believed to have leaked data on more than 200,000 forum members.
