A few days ago, on 14 April, the notorious Internet Forum, known as 4chan.org, was subject to a major hacking attack, which took the site down and made it inaccessible. As this writing, the site remains below.
Since its launch in 2003, 4chan has been entangled in a long series of controversies. As an anonymous platform, it has developed its own unique taste of pointed internet counters. You must have heard the 4chan mentioned in relation to Qanon, an anonymous user (going by “Q”) with claims of a deep state conspiracy.
But 4chan is not the only one of its kind. An anonymous user of a rival forum named Soyajak claimed responsibility for the hacked attack, and the claim was confirmed through a leaked email from 4chan administrators and intermediaries. Not only 4chan was taken down, but the source code and user data of the site were stolen and leaked, including user email addresses.
According to bleepingcomputer, the attack was made possible since 2016 by the extremely old version of PHP, which was largely unsafe against various security weaknesses.
In recent years, Benami English-Language Forum had more than 20 million unique visitors every month, so many users are affected by the incident. It remains to be seen whether the 4chan will recover from the attack and whether the users will rely enough to return to the site.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC Four Alla and was translated and localized from Swedish.
