Notorious internet message board 4chan has been hacked, posts claim

The notorious internet message board 4chan has been hacked, according to posts circulating online, some of which said that the hacker involved had revealed identifying details of the site’s moderators to the public.

The alleged hack first came to light when a defunct section of the site sprang back to life with the words “U GOT HACKED” emblazoned across the top, according to Wired magazine.

4chan has for years served as an incubator for some of the internet’s most viral memes, as well a range of subcultures. Credit: Bloomberg

Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybercrime monitoring company Hudson Rock, said the claim of a hack “looks legit”, citing the publicly circulating screenshots purporting to show 4chan’s backend infrastructure.

The publication TechCrunch cited an unnamed 4chan moderator as saying they had no reason to dispute the authenticity of the screenshots, and the site was only intermittently available on Tuesday.

An online account on a rival forum known as Soyjak.party posted screenshots allegedly showing 4chan’s backend systems, plus a list of alleged 4chan administrator and moderator usernames, with associated email addresses, Wired reported.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the details of the incident, nor who might be behind the alleged hack.

Messages sent to 4chan’s press email went unreturned. One of the two dozen or so alleged moderators purportedly exposed in the hack wrote back using their 4chan email address to say that the site had released a “video statement”. The user then pointed Reuters to an unrelated, explicit four-minute video montage. A request for further information was followed by a link to a different video with similar content.

Sparely designed, aggressively irreverent and lightly moderated, 4chan has for years served as an incubator for some of the internet’s most viral memes, as well a range of subcultures.

The amorphous internet vigilante group Anonymous coalesced on 4chan, as have extreme misogynists colloquially known as “incels” and elements of America’s extreme right.

Described as “the internet’s litter box”, it has long been notorious as a place to share gory videos, and more recently became known for hosting AI-generated non-consensual pornography.

It has tens of millions of visitors and spawned powerful online movements, but makes relatively little ad revenue. The reason: no brand wants to be associated with a website also once dubbed the “a------ of the internet”.

4chan was responsible for the 2014 celebrity nude photo leak, known online as The Fappening, in which a collection of nearly 500 private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted to the site, then across the internet.

It was also where terrorist Brenton Tarrant discussed his plans around a year before the 2019 Christchurch mosque terror attacks in New Zealand.

Reuters, Bloomberg, Stuff

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