Russia arrests alleged owner of cybercrime forum LeakBase, report says

On Wednesday, Russian police arrested the alleged administrator of the cybercrime forum LeakBase, according to the state-owned news agency TASS.

LeakBase was, as the U.S. Department of Justice put it, “one of the world’s largest online forums for cybercriminals” for sharing hacking tools and passwords. Earlier this month, U.S. authorities and Europol announced that they had shut down LeakBase’s official site, and seized its database of more than 142,000 members and 215,000 messages.

According to TASS, the alleged administrator, whose name was not released, and creator of LeakBase was a resident of Taganrog, a coastal city in southern Russia. 

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

“We don’t cooperate with Russian authorities and were not involved in the reported arrest,” Europol spokesperson Claire Georges told TechCrunch.

LeakBase was launched in 2021 and hosted an archive of hacked databases that included hundreds of millions of usernames and passwords, banking account and routing information, and credit card numbers. 

According to the Justice Department, the international operation against LeakBase involved law enforcement agents in 14 countries, and resulted in the execution of search warrants, arrests, and interviews in Australia, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In total, there were 13 arrests, according to The Record.