4chan hacked to oblivion, could it be over?

[Hitcore]

4chan is definitely controversial, and their politically incorrect image may not appeal to you, but say what you want: the site has spawned a lot of internet culture and memes for the past two decades that have become mainstream today, and with a user base of in the millions the following is a pretty big happening:

According to multiple sources the hacker have dumped the entire 4chan database.
Leaked screenshots show what appears to be internal dashboard data and moderator/janitor logs. The breach seems legit, and to make things even more remarkable, emails of janitors and moderators were leaked, some of which reportedly use .edu domains tied to American universities, which by itself is interesting.

Below some screenshots/posts on the matter, and below those a few links to news articles:






With LIVEBLOG:

4Chan down UPDATES: Website inaccessible for thousands after 'hacking' reports

CONTROVERSIAL website 4Chan has gone down for thousands with users unable to access the message board. More than 1,000 users of the site have logged complaints on the Downdetector website, which me…

www.the-sun.com

4chan hacked. Site is currently down. Might possibly be the end of 4chan News - Entertainment - Tech/Gadgets

News broke on the US Sun 2 hours ago. Here is a better article report aboit the situation. https://www.newsweek.com/4chan-down-hack-downdetector-reports-2059862 This Reddit post has a whole lot more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/Fzkp2s3Bon Someting about 4chan using...

www.resetera.com

Is 4chan down? What we know amid hack reports

Hundreds of 4chan users have reported problems.

www.newsweek.com

 

[Retro]

Nice to see them get a taste of their own medicine, finally.

 

[Hitcore]

This post captures how I feel about it.



If you go to /pol/, or /b/, then yeah those boards are toilets. But I liked going to /trv/ (travel), /out/ (outdoors), /vr/ (retro games), /mu/ (music), and /wg/ (wallpapers general). Wildly different crowds there, much more laid back. There is a clear distinction between the red boards (NSFW) and the blue boards (SFW).

Anyway, an update straight from 4chan itself. A one-liner, suggesting that they're on it, it just may take some time. Based on this, my educated guess is that they're probably going to rebuild it from scratch (since there is basically nothing left and how horribly outdated the engine was).



To be continued!

 

[Retro]

Shame to lose the good with the bad. I only knew them for their controversial side and didn't even know they had a good side like this.

 

[Hitcore]

It seems that my educated guess is starting to manifest itself.

 

[Hitcore]

 

[live627]

A single file script multiple thousand lines long is usually the sign of an old fashioned C developer from the old days when there was no concern for technical debt. Even recent versions of Simple Machines Forum (SMF) have multiple huge (1k+ loc) functions. Fortunately, lots of comments.

 

[AllThingsTech]

I’m surprised they bothered to bring it back online again given the costs, both repetitional and in terms of resources of updating such outdated software. As a software engineer myself, I know that updating languages often results in many bugs that aren’t even discovered immediately, and the cumulative damage resulting from the subsequent bugs along with the security breach will not be smooth to recover from imo.

 

[Hitcore]

It has been said among 4channers that the site is "the biggest honey pot on the internet". What they mean by that is that 3-letter agencies get a lot of intel out of certain boards, most notably /pol/ ("politically incorrect"), which is classified as having an extremistic nature. So much intel, that it is theorized that the agencies themselves have a say in how things get run there. With that in mind, aspects like costs and reputation kind of become irrelevant. Though it is remarkable that if this really were to be the case that they have let it come that far to neglect the site's security for so many years.
But who knows.

Edit: I make music videos, and a couple of weeks ago I went all-out with this track and anime styled video, where Sci-Fi/Fantasy meets reality meets conspiracy. It's pretty wild. Anyway, in one scene there is a reference to this:



I've depicted that board with a glowing honey pot. I love putting in little details like these, in my work. Easter Eggs, if you will, the video is absolutely riddled with them. It's the kind of thing that makes viewers who are part of certain communities go like "Oh crap, he knows!". It doesn't even matter if I actually believe those things myself, at the end of the day I mostly do it for entertainment purposes.

 

[AllThingsTech]

I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that 4chan doesn’t earn much, as the majority of its revenue comes from advertising, and companies avoid advertising there due to misalignment in values.