Interestingly enough, my first introduction to the world of "cyber security" spawned indirectly from being active on various hacker forums. Minecraft mods, cracked Burger King accounts, and shady Adobe Photoshop DLL files I (in hindsight) should not have ever downloaded required pay-walled style sign up in order to access.
Honestly, most of my juvenile online activity revolved around this fourms. I looked up to many of the well-respected "elders" in the communities that would just show up, drop a crack for some sneaker bot, disappear, only to come back online when the crack stopped working. I was always in awe of their techincal capacity to reverse engineer and jump over the digital walls of software I desired to use. (I mean I was a kid, and this was 2014, spending $100 on digital software licenses, thats a lot to a kid, and still somewhat of a foreign concept compared to the our post-Covid everything is an online subscription economy.)
But behind the hackers, scammers, carders, and script-kiddies, were geniue people. Many fourms (well at least the good ones) had active threads for categories such as health, music, personal life, and other off topic topics - such as why I should be buying Bitcoin in 2014. Many had active live chats similar to xat.com (RIP) on their homepage which facilitated additional conversation outside of actual forum posts and threads.
It was honestly a nostalgic era. I look forward to getting on these forums to see if my favorite software had been cracked yet, reading tutorials on using xss on some obscure random website, or just having random conversations. In fact, some of these members were first to wish me happy birthday, helped me make my first dollars online (still somewhat of a foreign concept at the time), and were genuinely helpful when it came to learning new things and making random scripts work.
That's what kind of made it addicting. Addicting may be an over statement, but that's what made these forums draw a community, an active community at that...
Depending on the form, the community differed.
There's an old adage that nothing good lasts forever. And in a sense, it is applicable when it comes to these communities. Many started getting very popular, and with the rise of bitcoin, many people made an absolute killing with the scripts and hacker-ready software they sold.
I mean it was always there, but the prevalence of malicious software increased - by this I mean legit/clean cracks, but with secret crypto-miners or just bundled with plain spyware. What was once a trusted online hacker community became a playground for serious ill-intented threat actors and scammers. Members sought to hack the fourm owners for notoriety and clout. This was the beginning of much distrust and broken relationships in these communites.
These fourms then had and hosted major national breaking news wo database breaches
National intrest angecies then pinned these fourms on their hallway bullition board.
They sought to take down these communties, unmask the posters, and research the digital footprints and intent of these digital outlaws.
And fast forward to today, we know that the agencies were very successful in doing this. Many of their plans were to hijack the forums and keep it running as essentially a honey pot. This created more distrust. And if they couldn't infiltrate the servers, it was a mission to disperse these communities with domain takeovers (which honestly was just a game of cat and mouse as the forum admins would switch or replicate to various TLDs (or domains) and keep it pinned on the homepage.) But even then, for infrequent users, that would come back to the forum after a few months, it required Google-search'ing friction to locate the new URL - and many times these agencies worked with major search engines to DCMA or "shadowban" the fourm's URLs - and for an added point, a newly indexed URL doesn't exactly populate straight to Page 1 of Google. Simply put: this created friction for the communites and thus a less community. When users would go back to these communites these desire to post and share decrease, because "less internet points" on their threads - it became less dopamine and prestige was harded to claim again unless you particated in a major breach.
The communties were broken up, but the individuals with such passions did not just disappear either. So, where did they go?
Well, a few places.