4chan Goes Offline After Hacker Appears to Hijack the Site
The infamous bulletin board site 4chan has gone offline, sparking speculation that it may be dead for good. Starting on Monday night, users reported a mass outage at the 4chan.org domain, which has persisted for over 12 hours, according to Downdetector.com.
During the outage, users spotted evidence that 4chan suffered a serious breach, allowing a hacker to gain access to the site. A screenshot obtained by some users appears to show an account from 4chan's owner Hiroyuki Nishimura writing: "LOL HACKED I LOVE DICKS." Another post from the hijacked Nishimura's account indicates that the hacker gained access to the backend administrative site for 4chan.
The same screenshot shows that 4chan runs on an old version of PHP, a scripting language for websites. This has led users to suspect that the hacker exploited age-old vulnerabilities in 4chan to conduct the takeover. As one user pointed out, using an outdated programming language is like leaving the back door wide open – it's just asking to be breached.
A rival imageboard at Soyjak.party has been celebrating the site's shutdown, with some users speculating that someone at Soyjak.party may have been involved in the hack. The Soyjak.party site has also been posting screenshots that show the hacker was able to access moderator functions for 4chan, including the ability to ban 4chan users and reveal their IP address, ISP, and geographic location.
Links have appeared on both Soyjak and another web forum, Kiwi Farms, claiming to contain data stolen from 4chan. This includes the usernames and email addresses for hundreds of moderators – potentially putting all registered users' information at risk. The situation is looking increasingly dire for 4chan's future.
Despite the chaos, 4chan has yet to respond to requests for comment or clarification on what happened. As one user noted, "If they can't even be bothered to respond to a simple request for information, that's not exactly reassuring." Only time will tell if 4chan will be able to recover from this devastating breach.