Hack Forums


Hack Forums is an internet forum. The website ranks as the number one website in the "Hacking" category in terms of web-traffic by the analysis company Alexa Internet. The site has been widely reported as facilitating criminal activity, such as the case of Zachary Shames, who in 2013 sold a keylogger which was used to steal personal information.

Security breaches

In June 2011, the hacktivist group LulzSec, as part of a campaign titled "50 days of lulz", breached Hack Forums and released the data they obtained. The leaked data included credentials and personal information of nearly 200,000 registered users.
On 27 August 2014, Hack Forums was hacked with a defacement message by an Egyptian hacker, using the online handle "Eg-R1z".
On 26 July 2016, Hack Forums administrator warned its users of a security breach. In an e-mail he suggested users to change their passwords and enable 2FA.

Botnets, arrests and hacking tools

According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, Zachary Shames developed a keylogger in 2013 that allowed users to steal sensitive information, including passwords and banking credentials, from a victim's computer. Shames developed the keylogger known as "Limitless Logger Pro", which was sold for $35 on Hack Forums.
On 12 August 2013, hackers used SSH brute-force to mass target Linux systems with weak passwords. The tools used by hackers were then later posted on hacking community, called, "Hack Forums".
On 15 May 2014, the FBI targeted customers of a popular Remote Administration Tool called 'Blackshades'. Blackshades RAT was malware created and sold on Hack Forums.
On 14 January 2016, the developer of the MegalodonHTTP Botnet was arrested. MegalodonHTTP included a number of features as "Binary downloading and executing", "Distributed Denial of service attack methods", "Remote Shell", "Antivirus Disabling", "Crypto miner for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Omnicoin and Dogecoin". The malware was sold on Hack Forums.
On 22 September 2016, many major websites were forced offline after being hit with “Mirai”, a malware that targeted unsecured Internet of Things devices. The source code for Mirai was published on Hack Forums as open-source. In response, on 26 October 2016, Omniscient, the administrator of Hack Forums, removed the DDoS-for-Hire section from the forum permanently.
On 21 October 2016, popular websites, including Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, were taken down by a distributed denial-of-service attack. Researchers claimed that the attack was stemmed from contributors on Hack Forums.
On Monday, 26 February 2018, Agence France-Presse reported that Ukrainian authorities had collared Avalanche cybercrime organizer Gennady Kapkanov, who was allegedly living under a fake passport in Poltava, a city in central Ukraine. He marketed the Remote Administration Tool and another software licensing program called Net Seal exclusively on Hack Forums. Earlier, in December 2016, the FBI had arrested Taylor Huddleston, the programmer who created NanoCore and announced it first on Hack Forums.
On 31 August 2018, several users on Hack Forums reported to have received an E-Mail from Google informing them that the FBI demanded the release of user data which linked to the case of LuminosityLink.

Critical reception

According to CyberScoop's Patrick Howell O'Neill, "The forum caters mostly to a young audience who are curious and occasionally malicious, but still learning... Furthermore, HackForums is the kind of internet community that can seem impenetrable, even incomprehensible, to outsiders. It has a reputation for being populated by trolls, chaos-driven children and brazen criminal activity."