AbuseWith.Us 2016 Data Breach
Threat Actor Infrastructure · Account hacking services and illicit access discussion · Account hacking forum · Global
AbuseWith.Us Email & Gaming Account Hacking Forum Breach (2016): 1.3 Million Member Accounts Exposed
Hacking forum offering account compromise services and illicit access discussion.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
65/100
Lower riskHigher risk
High and current: recent, valuable data circulating on the dark web now.
Data Sensitivity i
RestrictedBeing associated with this breach can itself be harmful. Disclosure is limited and presence is not confirmed to unverified parties.
1.3MRecords
2016Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Breach Summary
AbuseWith.Us, a hacking forum dedicated to email account and online gaming account compromise services, suffered multiple data breaches during 2016 with the breach data subsequently appearing in breach-trading communities and being indexed by Have I Been Pwned on October 9, 2017 with a breach-date of July 1, 2016. The breaches were not the subject of operator disclosure; the forum's data was itself compromised and traded by external parties, in a notable instance of threat actor infrastructure being subjected to the same breach dynamics as the legitimate websites that AbuseWith.Us members targeted. The breach affected approximately 1,372,550 unique email addresses based on records indexed by Have I Been Pwned (with DataBreach.com listing approximately 1,283,526 records). Compromised fields included email addresses, usernames, IP addresses, and passwords stored in a mix of plaintext and various hash formats. The dataset reflected both AbuseWith.Us forum membership records and credentials sourced from various other breaches that had been collected by AbuseWith.Us members for use in account-compromise operations. The shared-administrator connection between AbuseWith.Us and the LeakedSource credential-search service means that the AbuseWith.Us breach data was likely directly accessible to or aggregated within LeakedSource's broader credential database. For individuals whose email addresses appear in the AbuseWith.Us dataset, the practical risk profile is bifurcated. For individuals who were active AbuseWith.Us members (account-compromise practitioners or aspirants), the breach exposed their identification as participants in a hacking forum, with potential employment, professional, and legal consequences depending on jurisdiction and the user's actual activity on the forum. Such users should be aware that the breach data is now part of the public breach-notification infrastructure (via Have I Been Pwned) and may be referenced by future employment background checks, security clearance investigations, and similar inquiries. For individuals whose credentials were collected by AbuseWith.Us members from other breaches and stored within the AbuseWith.Us infrastructure (the larger population of affected individuals who never used AbuseWith.Us themselves), the breach represents an additional layer of credential exposure that may have already been addressed through the original source breach's remediation. Affected users should change any reused passwords on other accounts because the plaintext password exposure means any account where the same password was reused is fully compromised. The U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and equivalent statutes in other jurisdictions may apply to AbuseWith.Us members whose forum activity constituted unauthorized account access.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
1.3M records analyzed
About AbuseWith.Us
AbuseWith.Us was a now-defunct hacking forum that operated from approximately September 2013 until shutdown following law enforcement action against its operator. The forum originated as a community for learning and teaching how to hack accounts at Runescape (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in a medieval fantasy realm) and subsequently expanded into a general-purpose hacking forum offering account-compromise discussion and services for email accounts, gaming accounts, and other online services. AbuseWith.Us was administered under the alias 'Xerx3s' by individuals subsequently identified through Brian Krebs (KrebsOnSecurity) investigative reporting as connected to Jordan Evan Bloom, a Thornhill, Ontario resident who simultaneously operated the LeakedSource credential-search service. The forum's membership consisted of individuals seeking to learn account-compromise techniques, individuals offering account-compromise services for sale, and individuals seeking to acquire compromised accounts. As threat actor infrastructure, AbuseWith.Us maintained user accounts and discussion records that documented members' participation in account-compromise activity.
Why They Hold Your Data
Account-hacking forums collect user accounts, messages, illicit service listings, and discussion history tied to account compromise and criminal access workflows.
Recent Developments
AbuseWith.Us is now defunct, and the operator Jordan Evan Bloom was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on January 15, 2018 in connection with the LeakedSource service. Bloom's company Defiant Tech Inc. pleaded guilty in 2019 to operating LeakedSource, which had sold access to billions of stolen credentials including data from the Ashley Madison breach. The RCMP investigation indicated that Bloom made approximately $250,000 from selling hacked data through LeakedSource. Bloom's biographical timeline is notable because Bloom was hired as a developer at Ashley Madison in late 2014, resigned from Ashley Madison in June 2015 citing health reasons (less than one month before unidentified hackers stole data on 37 million Ashley Madison users), and launched LeakedSource three months after the Ashley Madison hack. The case has been formally cited as a leading example of the criminalization of breach-data-as-a-service operations.
Data Points Exposed
4 verified field types
Email Address
IP Address
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
The institutional impact on AbuseWith.Us has been effectively terminal. The forum was shut down following the law enforcement action against the LeakedSource operator. Jordan Evan Bloom was prosecuted by Canadian authorities through Defiant Tech Inc., with the 2019 guilty plea resolving the criminal proceedings. The case has been broadly cited in international cybersecurity coverage and law enforcement commentary as illustrating both the trajectory of breach-data-as-a-service operations and the inherent vulnerability of cybercrime infrastructure to subsequent compromise. AbuseWith.Us itself appearing as a breach in Have I Been Pwned (with members' email addresses, IP addresses, and passwords made public) represents a particularly significant case of reflexive exposure of the threat actor population.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A consumer-service breach: contact and account data supports phishing, account takeover and profile enrichment. For a high-profile principal the main risk is credible impersonation and enrichment of existing exposure.
What You Should Do
- Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping: cross-reference the exposed identifiers against broker-available data to size and prioritize the principal's wider footprint.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
Protect Yourself
Protect Yourself: Limited Disclosure
Check Your Own Exposure: Verification Required
This data originates from an illicit online forum, and being listed is not proof of involvement. To protect people from false association, we confirm exposure only to the individual concerned. Verify your identity to privately check your own exposure.
We never confirm whether a specific person appears in this breach to anyone but that person.
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