RaidForums forced to use mirror after Brazilian govt contacts registrar

The RaidForums hacking forum has gone through a turbulent week, with its website now forced through a mirror domain after a government filed a legal request with their registrar.

Last week, the popular hacking forum suddenly stopped working, leading people to wonder if law enforcement seized the site.

However, it was soon back up on a mirror domain with an announcement from the site’s owner that explained the outages were caused by a reluctance of their new registrar, NameSilo, to ignore the large number of government reports that regularly target the platform.

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According to the RaidForums admin known as ‘Omnipotent,’ NameSilo received a report from a certain government and proceeded to deactivate the website owner’s account immediately. This forced the platform to use a mirror until the main domain could be transferred back to the old registrar, CloudFlare, which can’t take place until October 30th at the earliest.

Raidforums is a clearnet site that lets users share, sell, and buy almost any data they want, including stolen data.

This clearly doesn’t resonate well with entities that suffer large-scale exposures or copyright infringement damages from what users post on the forum, so a deluge of takedown requests is common for the hacking forum.

Data breach expert “Dissent Doe” was told by the site owner that the report which resulted in their account entering a “client hold” status came from the Brazilian government.

Updating: According to RF’s owner/admin, it was the Brazilian govt. and only had impact because the domain was mid-transfer. https://t.co/KFTvmEB0yB

— Dissent Doe, PhD (@PogoWasRight) October 2, 2021

The Brazilian government may have objected to a recent post where threat actors offered the Serasa Experian data for purchase. Still, considering the large number of new threads published there each day, it may have been an older post.

The RaidForums owner claimed they moved from CloudFlare to NameSilo to strengthen its OpSec, and this was supposed to be a temporary, transitional step. However, because domains can only be transferred once every 60 days, waiting until October 30th, 2021, is now mandatory.

Recently, RaidForums blundered by accidentally exposing internal pages meant to be accessed by staff members only. While no sensitive or personally identifiable data were leaked in this incident, this was a careless mistake that exposed the practices of the forum staff.