- BreachForums user database (323,988 records) leaked, exposing usernames, registration dates and IP addresses
- Around 70,000 public IPs could help identify real users; most entries were useless loopback addresses
- The administrator confirmed that the leak was due to the August 2025 restore; ShinyHunters denied involvement in the hosting site
Someone has leaked the entire list of usernames, IP addresses, and other data from BreachForums, the infamous underground hacking community, but exactly who and why remains to be seen.
A website named after ransomware operator ShinyHunters recently appeared online and is used to host a 7Zip archive titled violadoforum.7z.
This file contained some files, including a database table with 323,988 member records, which contained member display names, registration dates, IP addresses, and other internal information.
ShinyHunters denies involvement
While user accounts don’t mean much to investigators or law enforcement, IP addresses can. Most of them are mapped to a local loopback IP address (0x7F000009/127.0.0.9), beepcomputer reported, saying that “they are not very useful.”
Still, just over 70,000 addresses do not contain the 127.0.0.9 IP address and map to a public IP address, meaning they could theoretically be used to identify real people behind the usernames.
The forum administrator confirmed the breach and said that a backup copy of the MyBB user database table was temporarily exposed to the Internet and was downloaded only once.
“First of all, this is not a recent incident. The data in question originates from an old user table leak dating back to August 2025, during the period when BreachForums was being restored/recovered from the .hn domain,” they said.
“During the restore process, the forum’s user table and PGP key were temporarily stored in an unsecured folder for a very short period of time. Our investigation shows that the folder was downloaded only once during that window,” they added.
Who leaked the data also remains a mystery. The ShinyHunters group denied any involvement and said they had nothing to do with the website that was in their name. When BreachForums was reestablished last summer after a police raid, this group said the forum was now a nest built by police to catch other hackers and cybercriminals.
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