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Infamous online message board 4chan is back online following a cyber attack-induced outage it suffered earlier in the month.
On 15 April, 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 rival image board called the Soyjak Party.
On Friday (25 April), 4chan restored its website and published a statement revealing how the cyber attack occurred.
“On the afternoon of April 14th, a hacker using a UK IP address exploited an out-of-date software package on one of 4chan’s servers, via a bogus PDF upload. With this entry point, they were eventually able to gain access to one of 4chan’s servers, including database access and access to our own administrative dashboard,” said the 4chan blog.
“The hacker spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan’s source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began to vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan’s servers were halted, preventing further access.”
4chan described the damage, which was caused by its systems not being updated, as catastrophic.
“While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion,” said 4chan.
“Ultimately, this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns.”
The image board added that it had begun the process of updating its systems in 2024, but the lack of man-time the development team was able to give to 4chan was “insufficient”.
However, it said that during the time the site was down, it began updating its servers and restoring its service.
“The server that was breached has been replaced, with the operating system and code updated to the latest versions. PDF uploads have been temporarily disabled on those boards that supported them, but they will be back in the near future,” said 4chan.
“One slow but much beloved board, /f/ - Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.
“4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.”
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