Finally, some potential good news. 4chan, the anonymous message board that’s been the breeding ground for some of the worst shit on the internet, could be gone forever.
On Tuesday, the notorious site began experiencing a series of outages following a major hack that purportedly exposed its source code. As reported by WIRED, a user on rival forum Soyjak.party claimed responsibility for the attack, posting screenshots allegedly showing 4chan’s backend structure and a list of alleged moderator email addresses.
Soyjak.party users then started doxxing the accounts included in the data leak. TechCrunch spoke to a “janitor” (or junior moderator) whose email was listed in the leak, reporting that the person said they were “confident” that the hack was “all real.”
Although the janitor said they were unhappy about the “greater magnitude” of the leaked information compared to the past, they expressed greater concern about 4chan’s future.
“I’d wager that the fact that 4chan was effectively taken over by a hacker(s) is probably ‘worse’ than screenshots, at least from the perspective of the site’s continued operation,” the janitor said.
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WIRED spoke to UC Riverside computer science and engineering professor Emiliano De Cristofaro about the potential impact of the hack. “It seems true that 4chan hasn’t been properly maintained and patched for years, which might indicate that a hack would have definitely been a possibility,” he said. “There might be some ‘high profile’ users exposed as moderators — traditionally, 4chan users hate them, so they might be targeted. It might be hard or at least painfully slow and costly for 4chan to recover from this, so we might really see the end of 4chan as we know it.”
If that’s the case, the final words posted on 4chan may be “CHICKEN JOCKEY,” as The A.V. Club points out.
Outside of launching the hacktivist group Anonymous, 4chan’s greatest hits include “The Fappening” celebrity nude photos leak, Gamergate, QAnon, and a connection to the racially motivated 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo. Good fucking riddance.
- Source: NEWHD MEDIA
