An international coalition of law enforcement agencies from Australia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the United States collaborated to take down and seize two prominent hacking forums and two related cybercriminal services on Thursday.
Europol and Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) revealed the takedown operations on Thursday, followed by the U.S. Department of Justice publishing its announcement with more details about the forums, named Cracked and Nulled.
According to the DOJ, Cracked had over four million users since 2018, generating approximately $4 million in revenue and impacting at least 17 million Americans with stolen information. One victim in New York was cyberstalked and harassed using tools from Cracked.
The forums’ seizures aimed to disrupt this type of cybercrime and the proliferation of cybercrime tools in the community, the DOJ added.
Nulled, operational since 2016, had over five million users and 43 million posts advertising hacking tools and stolen data, with an annual revenue of $1 million, as per the DOJ press release.
The press release highlighted Lucas Sohn, a 29-year-old Argentinian in Spain, as an active administrator of Nulled facing criminal charges for trafficking passwords and unauthorized access to computers.
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