4chan may be ending following hackers taking control
The controversial platform started experiencing numerous outages earlier this week The post 4chan may be ending following hackers taking control appeared first on NME.
4chan – an anonymous message board that has grown infamous for its controversial content – may be coming to an end.
The forum allows users to anonymously share pictures and text, and has gathered a hugely negative connotation due to its inclusion of extreme right-wing views, gory videos, and non-consensual sexual content (as per Sky News). It has also been responsible for a number of celebrities’ nude photos being leaked, and connected to the racially motivated 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo.
Now, it seems that the site may be gone forever following a massive hack.
On Tuesday (April 15), the site began experiencing numerous outages, this was due to a major hack that intentionally exposed its source code. Reports from WIRED confirmed that responsibility for the attack was taken by a user on the rival forum Soyjak.party. This was after the user shared a variety of screenshots which allegedly showed 4chan’s backend structure and alleged moderator email addresses.
TechCrunch later confirmed the severity of the leak, speaking to a junior moderator who had their email listed in the leak, and having them confirm that the hack was “real”.
“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,” they told the outlet.
Around the same time, WIRED spoke to UC Riverside computer science and engineering professor Emiliano De Cristofaro, who explained that the hack could lead to the complete demise of the platform.
“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.”
Recent years have seen 4chan increasingly on the radar of US government officials, and part of the reason for it being kept online is allegedly due to investment by a Japanese company.
As highlighted by WIRED, back in 2023 a report revealed how the site’s policies allowed for the highly toxic content to emerge.
This included highlighting how moderators explicitly allowed racism, and how calls for violence on 4chan were recurrently not met with user bans.
The post 4chan may be ending following hackers taking control appeared first on NME.
