The Uncomfortable Truth: We Celebrate When the 'Right' Criminals Get Hacked

Source: Dev.to

When BreachForums, one of the internet’s most notorious criminal marketplaces, had its own user database leaked this week, something revealing happened in cybersecurity circles. Instead of the usual hand‑wringing about data breaches and victim impact, there was quiet satisfaction—maybe even a few barely‑suppressed smiles.

This reaction exposes an uncomfortable truth about our industry. Despite our professional codes of ethics and public stance against unauthorized access, many security practitioners harbor a dirty little secret: sometimes we root for the hackers.

The BreachForums breach wasn’t just another data incident. It was poetic justice served digitally, and our collective response reveals a moral complexity we rarely acknowledge publicly. This matters because the cybersecurity industry’s credibility rests on consistent ethical principles, not situational ethics that change based on who’s getting attacked.

Why BreachForums mattered

• The forum facilitated the sale of stolen personal data, corporate network access, and other illegal services.
• Its 324,000 users weren’t casual privacy advocates; they were active participants in a criminal economy that has caused billions in damages and immeasurable personal harm.

When someone—possibly connected to the ShinyHunters extortion group—leaked the forum’s user database, complete with IP addresses and registration details, the incident took on the character of frontier justice. The criminals got a taste of their own medicine.

What the leak contained

• Over 70,000 records with real IP addresses that could be “valuable to law enforcement,” according to security researchers.
• In other words, this breach might actually help catch the bad guys. It’s vigilante justice wrapped in SQL dumps and compressed into a 7‑Zip file.

Forum administrator “N/A”
“The data in question originates from an old users‑table leak dating back to August 2025, during the period when BreachForums was being restored/recovered.”

The tone is matter‑of‑fact, as if discussing a minor accounting error rather than a massive operational security failure.

The hidden celebration

Here’s what we don’t talk about at security conferences: many practitioners privately celebrate when criminal infrastructure gets disrupted, regardless of whether law enforcement or other criminals are doing the disrupting. We’ve created an informal hierarchy of acceptable targets, and criminal forums sit squarely in the “deserves whatever happens to them” category.

This selective moral outrage isn’t entirely unjustified. BreachForums wasn’t hosting political dissidents or privacy advocates. It was a marketplace for human misery, where stolen medical records, Social Security numbers, and corporate credentials changed hands for cryptocurrency. The forum’s previous iterations were linked to major data breaches affecting millions of innocent victims.

When security researchers analyze the BreachForums leak, they’re not looking for ways to protect the exposed users; they’re looking for intelligence opportunities:

• Leaked IP addresses become investigative leads.
• Usernames become attribution data points.
• Operational‑security failures become case studies in how criminal organizations can be disrupted.

The uncomfortable question

If we’re comfortable with this kind of digital vigilantism when it targets criminals, what does that say about our commitment to universal principles of data protection and privacy?

Honeypot theory

Adding another layer of complexity, BreachForums has been repeatedly accused of being a law‑enforcement honeypot. ShinyHunters claimed the forum was controlled by law enforcement, though administrators denied this. Whether true or not, the accusation highlights how blurred the lines have become between legitimate law‑enforcement operations and criminal activity online.

• If BreachForums was indeed a honeypot, then this “breach” might actually represent law enforcement losing control of its own operation.
• Alternatively, it could be a sophisticated misdirection campaign designed to maintain the forum’s credibility among criminals while gathering intelligence.

This ambiguity should make security professionals uncomfortable. We’re essentially cheering for an attack on what might be a legitimate law‑enforcement operation, based solely on our assumption that the target deserved it.

Proportionality and legality

Law‑enforcement honeypots are designed to gather evidence for prosecution, following legal frameworks and oversight mechanisms. Criminal‑on‑criminal attacks follow no such constraints. When we celebrate the latter, we’re implicitly endorsing a more aggressive approach to cyber operations than our own governments are legally allowed to pursue.

Attribution complexity

What makes the BreachForums incident particularly interesting is the attribution puzzle:

• ShinyHunters, the group allegedly behind the leak, claimed they weren’t actually responsible for distributing it.
• A website “named after the ShinyHunters extortion gang” released the data, but the group itself denied involvement.

This kind of false‑flag operation or plausible deniability is becoming standard in the cyber‑crime ecosystem. Groups routinely disavow operations that might bring unwanted attention while benefiting from the chaos they create. It’s a sophisticated form of information warfare that makes traditional attribution nearly impossible.

For security professionals trying to track these groups, this creates a fascinating problem:

How do you analyze threats from organizations that exist in a constant state of Schrödinger’s responsibility?
ShinyHunters simultaneously did and didn’t leak the BreachForums database, depending on who’s asking and when.

This attribution shell game should concern us more than it seems to. When we can’t reliably identify who is behind an operation, our ethical footing becomes shaky, and the line between justice and vigilantism blurs even further.

Ethical inconsistency in the industry

The security industry’s inconsistent response to cybercrime reveals a deeper problem: we’ve developed situational ethics around data protection.

• Steal from a hospital? That’s unconscionable.
• Steal from criminals? That’s intelligence gathering.

Both responses might be practically justified, but they’re ethically inconsistent. Either unauthorized access is wrong, or it isn’t. Either data protection is a fundamental right, or it’s a privilege we grant based on moral worthiness.

Toward a more nuanced framework

The industry needs to acknowledge this moral complexity rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Our current approach—publicly condemning all unauthorized access while privately celebrating attacks on criminal infrastructure—undermines our credibility and creates confusion about our actual values.

• Develop nuanced frameworks that recognize the reality of criminal‑on‑criminal attacks without abandoning ethical principles.
• Be transparent about relationships with law‑enforcement operations; acknowledge when intelligence comes from questionable means.

The danger of celebrating vigilantism

Most importantly, we must recognize that celebrating vigilante justice—even against criminals—sets a dangerous precedent. Today we cheer for attacks on BreachForums. Tomorrow we might find ourselves defending against groups who decide our organizations are legitimate targets based on their own moral calculations.

The BreachForums leak reveals something troubling about the cybersecurity industry’s moral foundation. We’ve become comfortable with ethical inconsistency as long as it serves our practical interests. This flexibility might seem pragmatic in the short term, but it undermines the principled stance we need to maintain credibility in policy debates and public discourse.

When we selectively apply our ethical framework based on target worthiness, we’re essentially arguing that data protection is conditional rather than fundamental. That’s a dangerous precedent in an era where governments and corporations are increasingly eager to justify surveillance and cyber operations based on the perceived righteousness of their cause.

The criminals who used BreachForums deserved consequences, but those consequences should come through legitimate law‑enforcement and judicial processes, not through digital vigilantism that we celebrate from the sidelines. Our industry’s future credibility depends on maintaining that distinction, even when it’s inconvenient.