Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the creator of the infamous BreachForums hacking discussion board, has been resentenced to 3 years in jail after a US appeals court docket overturned his prior sentence of time served and 20 years of supervised launch.
Fitzpatrick, 22, of Peekskill, New York, operated the BreachForums market the place criminals traded hacked and stolen knowledge – together with checking account particulars, social safety numbers, hacking instruments, breached databases, passwords, and extra.
Fitzpatrick, who used the net deal with “Pompompurin”, created BreachForums within the wake of the FBI’s shutdown of its predecessor RaidForums.
RaidForums had been working since 2015, and was thought-about one of many world’s largest hacking boards with a neighborhood of over half 1,000,000 customers. Upon its demise in 2022, a lot of RaidForums’ customers jumped ship to Fitzpatrick’s newly-created BreachForums to commerce their stolen knowledge.
Fitzpatrick helped assist different cybercriminals purchase and promote stolen knowledge, hacking instruments, and different illicit materials, and profited by charging customers for BreachForums credit and membership charges.
His prison scheme got here crashing down in March 2023 when the Division of Justice introduced that it had disrupted the BreachForums web site, and arrested its administrator.
By July 2023, Fitzpatrick had pleaded responsible to hacking prices and the possession of kid sexual abuse materials, and located himself awaiting sentencing.
Whereas he was ready for his trial, Fitzpatrick was launched on bond – underneath situation that he didn’t use a PC with out monitoring software program managed by the pretrial companies places of work, and never use a VPN. Unwisely for Fitzpatrick, these have been guarantees that he discovered inconceivable to maintain – and having violated the situations, Fitzpatrick was arrested once more in January 2024.
Lastly, in January of this 12 months, Fitzpatrick discovered himself receiving a surprisingly lenient sentence for his position in managing the BreachForums hacking web site. Whereas prosecutors had been looking for to see “Pompompurin” sentenced to greater than 15 years in jail, Fitzpatrick ended up being despatched to jail for simply 17 days.
The top of the story? It appears not.
As a result of now Fitzpatrick has begun a brand new three 12 months jail sentence, following the involvement of the US Court docket of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
“Following the dismantlement of RaidForums by legislation enforcement, the defendant arrange and administered BreachForums, a web-based bazaar the place criminals may buy delicate knowledge,” mentioned Appearing Assistant Lawyer Common Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Division’s Felony Division. “At the moment’s sentence demonstrates the Justice Division’s unwavering dedication to bringing to justice those that search to promote stolen knowledge to the very best bidder. To these looking for to function the same discussion board, take be aware: we’ll tirelessly examine those that commit these crimes.”
And what of BreachForums? Effectively, Fitzpatrick could not be operating it – however it’s nonetheless working underneath a brand new area, exploiting the notoriety that of a model first created by Conor Brian Fitzpatrick.
