{"id":591567,"date":"2025-04-15T19:31:34","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T17:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=591567"},"modified":"2025-04-15T19:36:55","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T17:36:55","slug":"4chan-reportedly-hacked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/591567-4chan-reportedly-hacked.html","title":{"rendered":"4chan reportedly hacked"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An unknown attacker reportedly gained full access to the server hosting the controversial Internet forum 4chan and leaked details about its source code and database online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outage tracker Downdetector shows that the site has been offline since around 04:00 this morning, and the site remained non-functional at the time of publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4chan was launched by Christopher \u201cmoot\u201d Poole in October 2003 when he was still a teenager. He remained the site\u2019s administrator until 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google hired Poole in 2016 to work on the Google+ social network. When Google+ failed, he became a product manager of Google Maps. He left the company in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on reports from users about the hack, the attacker reopened 4chan\u2019s \/qa\/ discussion board, where they posted details about the attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4chan\u2019s \/qa\/ forum was intended as a meta discussion board for questions and answers about the site itself. It was closed several years ago after being overrun with spam and off-topic content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Screenshots of the \/qa\/ thread posted online show that the attackers were promoting a rival image board, claiming they had \u201cwon\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a thread on the rival board, an anonymous user claimed that the hacker leaked 4chan\u2019s code and the personal information of staff after being in its system for over a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The user claimed a 4chan admin took its servers offline in an attempt to control the damage, explaining why the site was only intermittently available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The screenshots also showed that the attacker appeared to have gained administrative access to 4chan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One image showed an internal discussion in \/j\/, a private board for moderators, who are called janitors or \u201cjannies\u201d by the site\u2019s users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moderators\u2019 email addresses were also released as part of the leak, and users remarked that a significant number of them ended in .edu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.edu is the top-level domain used by many educational institutions in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not updated since at least 2016<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Screenshot showing the 4chan database that an attacker leaked on 15 April 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Joshua Moon, the founder and operator of another rival and arguably even more controversial forum, posted on Twitter\/X that 4chan was running on an extremely old operating system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It appeared as though the new owners of 4chan had done nothing since buying it from Poole ten years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy theory on 4chan’s hack is that he found the origin IP of the root server through Cloudflare somehow, then used a public exploit,\u201d Moon said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey’re running FreeBSD 10.1, which reached end-of-life in 2016. I don’t think anyone has updated it since moot left.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another Twitter user who goes by the name “Please Stop Talking Comics” highlighted that, in addition to the old version of FreeBSD, the 4chan code itself was very poorly constructed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAlmost the entirety of 4chan is a badly formatted, mostly uncommented 10,000+ line file called imgboard.php,\u201d they said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSome functions, like the one that makes a new post, are over 2000(!!!) lines long.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Controversial Internet forum 4chan has reportedly been hacked and information about its source code and database leaked online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":591568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[26672,99603,99604],"class_list":["post-591567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-4chan","tag-christopher-poole","tag-joshua-moon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591573,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591567\/revisions\/591573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}