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Infamous online message board 4chan has allegedly been hacked after the service experienced outages and the site was hijacked and defaced.
4chan is a controversial online message board that has been used to coordinate online harassment, pranks, and cyber activity like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, as well for posts containing offensive and sometimes illegal content.
While majority of 4chan users aren't criminals, its mild approach to censorship and moderation, as well as its users being entirely anonymous, has attracted toxic and criminal activity, as well as QAnon and the incel movements. It is also the birthplace of a large number of internet memes, and the Anonymous digital vigilante group.
Rumours of a hack first appeared following widespread outages on the site, only to be all but confirmed when a previously disabled part of the site came back online to display the words “U GOT HACKED”, according to WIRED.
While the threat actor behind the alleged cyber attack has not been formally identified, users on X (formerly Twitter) have highlighted claims made by a group called the Soyjak Party.
Also known as “The Party” or “Sharty”, Soyjak Party is a rival imageboard site that is best known for creating and sharing Soyjacks, a variation of the internet cartoon “Wojak”, in a style that depicts a “soy boy”. Features include glasses, stubble, a bald or balding head and what is referred to as the “cuckface”, which depicts the character with an excited expression and a shocked, gaping mouth.
Additionally, Soyjak Party was largely created by former members of the 4chan /qa/ board in 2020 after the board was banned, which led to tensions between the two imageboards.
“Tonight has been a very special night for many of us at the Soyjak party,” said a post on Soyjak Party.
“Today, April 14, 2025, a hacker, who has been in 4cuck’s system for over a year, executed the true operation soyclipse, reopening /qa/, exposing personal information of various 4cuck staff, and leaking code from the site.
“For nuteens, the last oldGODs, and everyone in between, tonight has been cathartic.”
According to an X post, Soyjak Party restored the /qa/ board and leaked the email addresses and passwords of the moderators, also known as “janitors” or “jannies”, as well as their Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Some email addresses exposed real names.
4chan got hacked by the sharty, they restored /QA/, they leaked the jannies passwords, their IRC, the site is slowing down, this is MASSIVE pic.twitter.com/Nzpn6rGl5o
— Priniz (@Priniz_twt) April 15, 2025
Additionally, 4chan source code was also allegedly leaked. According to X user @_yushe (Yushe), the source code is real.
Update: Now that catbox is back online I curled the alleged source code leak and its real.
— Yushe (@_yushe) April 15, 2025
This isn’t the entire source code only yotsuba.php which is the main file which manages things like posting and reporting posts. It has over 10k lines.
Yushe also said that the hack was likely caused by 4chan using an “extremely out-of-date version of PHP that has a lot of vulnerabilities and exploits and are using deprecated function to interact with [their] MySQL database”, something they were apparently working on fixing.
According to cyber security collective VX Underground, tensions between the /qa/ board and the /lgbt/ board, which led to user raids on the latter by the former before /qa/ became defunct, could also have contributed to the motive of the hack.
“Nerds got mad because they accused 4chan of being more akin to Reddit now and asserted 4chan had lost its edge – in much less kind words,” said the head of VX Underground, ‘Smelly’.
“So they left to Soyjak.st, the forwarded domain, and some people from there decided to compromise 4chan.
“This isn’t really shocking behavior – these imageboards and *chans have historically always had conflict with different boards or domains.”
While it is unclear whether or not 4chan themselves have publicly acknowledged the incident, an anonymous 4chan moderator speaking with TechCrunch said there was no sign that the hack was illegitimate, while the co-founder of Israeli cyber firm Hudson Rock, Alon Gal, told Reuters that the hack claim “looks legit”.
However, Reuters said that one of the alleged moderators exposed in the claimed incident said 4chan released a video statement, which the publication said was “unrelated”.
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