Police in France have reportedly arrested five members of the infamous BreachForums hacking forum, including prominent members linked to the release of stolen data from major companies.

First reported by French media outlet Le Parisien, the arrests were undertaken by specialist police officers from the Cybercrime Brigade of the Paris Police headquarters. The same report also noted that those arrested were French, despite the fact that BreachForums had been previously presumed to have Russian links.

Of the five members said to have been arrested, four were arrested on Monday, while the fifth member of the group, known as “IntelBroker,” was arrested in February.

IntelBroker has a colorful history of releasing stolen data on BreachForums. That includes personally identifiable information from members of Congress stolen from DC Health Link in March 2023, from General Electric Co. — including Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency documents in November 2023 — as well as from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in June 2024 and from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. in January.

The four alleged members of BreachForums arrested this week included ShinyHunters, Hollow, Noct and Depressed. Of the four, ShinyHunters is the best-known.

Like IntelBroker, ShinyHunters’ name has also popped up time and again in relation to stolen data on BreachForums. Some of ShinyHunters’ releases include 7.5 million records from financial services provide Dave Inc. in July 2020, 1.8 million from Pixlr in January 2021, from dating site MeetMindful also in January 2021, from 533 million Facebook users in April 2021, and 3 terabytes of data from Advance Auto Parts Inc. in June 2024.

It’s not clear what the exact charges are and it has always been somewhat of a mystery whether various members of BreachForums were behind actual hacks, were acting as stolen data brokers, or both. In ShinyHunters’ case, it was likely both, as a report in July last year had AT&T Inc. paying $370,000 in bitcoin to ShinyHunters to stop the release of stolen details.

Whatever they’re accused of, all five will likely be facing serious jail time given the extent of BreachForums operations and the extent of the data that has been stolen and then sold or released.

The original founder of the BreachForums, U.S. national Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, was arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in March 2023, with the site seized and taken offline in May 2024. The site was then resurrected later the same month under the control of ShinyHunters.

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