“The damage was catastrophic”: the controversial forum 4chan after being pirated

Two weeks of interruption. Inaccessible since April 15, 4Chan has returned for a few days. Allowing anonymous arguing, this forum is often described as a “network garbage” was the goal of a hacker, as explained in a blog article published this Saturday, April 26.

This allowed him to access one of the 4chan servers and, therefore, “spend several hours exfiltrated the tables of the database and a large part of the 4chan source code,” the site added.

A longer than expected process

But the hacker did not stop there, starting to “loot” 4chan after downloading what he wanted. Faced with this attack, the forum moderators arrested the servers to avoid any subsequent access. The damage was “catastrophic,” said the site.

A problem that is linked to the “lack of work to update our code and our infrastructure, and for the fact that we have been deprived of money for years by advertisers, payments and service providers that have succumbed to external pressure campaigns,” he said.

In detail, the forum operated on bought servers used by its founder, Christopher Poole, for several years. Having started looking for potential suppliers in April 2024, he quickly found it, ending the purchase in June. The new servers were published online in July. But it was still necessary to transfer the functions while continued depending on the old ones for the key functions.

The 4chan teams, however, ensure that they did not remain inactive during these two weeks of interruption. To start, they replaced the server in which the pirate was introduced. The site has also updated its operating system and code with the most recent versions.

PDF downloads have also been temporarily deactivated, 4Chan promising to restore them “in the near future.” On the other hand, the Flash section, which housed the files, has been definitively eliminated, “because there is no realistic medium to avoid similar exploits” using these files, the site said.

Despite these obstacles, the 4chan teams claim that they will not give up. “4Chan is back. No other website can replace it or this community,” concludes the site.