Posted on March 28, 2021 at 7:12 PM

300,000 Hacker Accounts Exposed on a Credit Card Hacking Forum

A hack on Carding Mafia has exposed more than 300,000 credit card user account details. The details of the hack were shared by ‘Have I Been Pawned.’

Carding mafia is a platform that steals and trades personal credit cards. According to a statement issued by ‘Have I Been Pawned’, this platform was hacked and it has exposed more than 300000 user accounts. The data breach led to the exposing of crucial details of the hacked credit card details including email addresses, IP addresses and login details. On the announcement, ‘Have I Been Pawned’ stated that the data breach happened on the previous week.

Carding Mafia did not provide any announcement to its users about the hack. On the Telegram Channel of this forum, they did not issue any update to inform their users about the hack. There are over half a million users on the platform according to a recent statistic that the forum presented. The owner of this platform ignored an email that was sent to him urging him to comment on the matter.

Was the hack legitimate?

According to Troy Hunter, who is the creator of ‘Have I Been Pawned’, the database hack was legit because he could highlight Mailinator email addresses from it. A Mailinator address allows people to create pseudo email addresses that they can dispose after use. Troy used one of the pseudo email addresses to login into the platform by clicking on ‘Forget Password’ and he was automatically logged into the platform. Since these email addresses were recognized by the Carding Mafia platform, it shows that the data collected from the hack was factual.

Besides the information provided by ‘Have I Been Pawned’ no other platforms have come forward to authenticate the hack. Cyber security firms have also been unable to prove the claims made. However, a user on another hacking platform advertised the data stolen from the Carding Mafia database. This is another confirmation of the hacking incident.

The trend of hackers getting hack by other hackers has not started recently. The past few years has seen similar hacking trends where cybercriminals are getting hack and their databases exposed. Besides Carding Mafia, the other hackers who have been hacked include Darkode. A group of hackers stole the database for this platform, a few minutes after the platform was launched. OGUSERS has also been hacked in 2019 and in 2020. OGUSERS is a notorious hacking platform that is attributed to the data breach of social media accounts such as Instagram and others. On OGUSERS, hackers exchange the social media data of the hacked accounts.

What is the purpose of these hacks?

It is not yet clear as to the intention of these hacks. Cyber-attacks within the cybercriminal community can be seen as a way of eliminating competition through exposing the weaknesses of other hackers. It can also be done as a way of proving the hacking prowess of different parties. Despite the reason behind these attacks, millions of users are left vulnerable after their information is exposed.