US Department of Justice and Europol announced the dismantlement of LeakBase during Operation Leak on 3–4 March 2026. The forum had over 142,000 registered members and specialised in trading stealer logs, hacked databases and hundreds of millions of stolen credentials. Fourteen countries participated, with around 100 enforcement actions targeting 37 of the most active users. The investigation, led by Amsterdam Police since 2023, deanonymised users via the forum’s seized database. Europol’s Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce ran a Joint Command Post for real-time cross-border intelligence sharing. Within days of the seizure, LeakBase resurfaced on a new domain, illustrating the recurrent migration cycle from seized platforms to successor forums that law enforcement now addresses as a persistent structural challenge.
Original source: US Department of Justice
Retrieved: 2026-03-20 | Language: EN | Reading time: 4 min read