FBI Shuts Down WeLeakInfo, a Marketplace for Leaked Data

This week, a joint operation by the FBI and law enforcement agencies from Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom led to the seizure of the domain for the website WeLeakInfo.com. For over three years, this service sold access to data from more than 12.5 billion accounts, collected from 10,000 different data breaches. In effect, the site provided paying users with access to people’s passwords in plain text. Access to the site cost as little as $2 per day.

WeLeakInfo was well-known and popular on the dark web. Hackers would purchase access to the site and then search for the name, email address, or username of a target they wanted to hack. In response, the site would return all data associated with that user, previously leaked from various sources, including passwords if available. Criminals would then use these passwords to try to log into different accounts belonging to the victim, hoping that the person reused the same password across multiple sites.

In its press release, the U.S. Department of Justice asked the public for help in identifying the site’s owners. A day later, Dutch police arrested a 22-year-old man who appears to have been an operator of WeLeakInfo.

Not the First Site of Its Kind

This is not the first time such a resource has been shut down. Back in 2017, law enforcement also took down another “leak aggregator” that sold stolen personal data—LeakedSource. Its creators, Defiant Tech Inc., collected dumps from various data breaches (both from public sources and by purchasing them directly from hackers), then sold access to this massive database to anyone interested. The data available on the site included usernames, full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and passwords in plain text.

Currently, there are at least three other sites operating in the same way as LeakedSource and WeLeakInfo, selling access to stolen data, including plain text passwords. These are Dehashed, Snusbase, and Leak-Lookup.