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Is 4chan dead? The infamous bulletin board site has gone offline, possibly from a serious hack, causing some to wonder if the site can recover.
Starting on Monday night, users began reporting a mass outage at the 4chan.org domain, which has persisted for the last 12 hours, according to Downdetector.com.
But during the outage, users spotted evidence that 4chan suffered a breach that enabled a hacker to gain access to the site. This includes a screenshot that apparently shows an account from 4chan’s owner Hiroyuki Nishimura writing: “LOL HACKED I LOVE DICKS.”
Another post from the hijacked Nishimura’s account indicates the hacker gained access to the backend administrative site for 4chan. The same screenshot shows that 4chan runs on an old version of PHP, a scripting language for websites.
As a result, users suspect the hacker exploited age-old vulnerabilities in 4chan to conduct the takeover. A rival imageboard at Soyjak.party has also been celebrating the site’s shutdown.
It’s possible someone at Soyjak.party was involved in the hack since the 4chan board for questions and answers was briefly changed to say “SOYJAK.PARTY WON.” The Soyjak.party site has also been posting screenshots that show the hacker was able to access moderator functions for 4chan. This includes accessing the ability to ban 4chan users, revealing their IP address, ISP, and geographic location.
In addition, links have appeared on Soyjak and on another web forum, Kiwi Farms, that claim to contain data stolen from 4chan, including the usernames and email addresses for hundreds of moderators. So, it’s possible the hacker may have stolen email address information for all registered users of the site.
4chan didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ookla, which is owned by PCMag parent Ziff Davis.