04-16-2025, 07:31 PM
As some of you may know the infamous 4chan imageboard has been hacked and the site was taken offline shortly after. This actually occurred a couple days ago, in the very late hours (US time zones). I didn't want to post anything until all my pigeons had returned to their roost and I had a more complete picture of the information.
I am not at liberty to discuss my sources, but this isn't really important news and is in chitchat for those that might be interested. A couple of my routine sources are covering it and likely have some of those responsible in their orbit, but there's a relatively small pool that's reliable for things of this nature and they're not very far removed from each other. New sources I've tapped for this are probably only one step removed from the direct source of the leak. Caveat emptor.
The hack exploited PDF vulnerabilities. A malicious package was uploaded and, due to another vulnerability in the application that processes PDFs for a thumbnail display, the hacker was able to get access. This wasn't just a simple script kiddie hack like the ATS profile editor, but depended on a couple vulnerabilities and crossed over into the real back end of the system. It seems like most of them were third-party solutions that weren't properly updated, patched, or replaced. Not sure on that last part, but seems to be the case. I think there may have been one issue in the proprietary code exploited too, but I'm guessing those were fairly numerous and mostly not directly implicated in the breach.
The source code has been leaked and I don't think it would be inaccurate to say that 4chan was suffering from the same type of technical difficulties as ATS. Not to the same degree as ATS, but 4chan had a much larger user base of potential hostiles that could exploit their spaghetti code and out of date support applications. They kept up better than ATS out of necessity, but it was obviously not adequate to protect against the threat levels they faced.
The screen names and email addresses of mods and jannies have been leaked. I'm not sure the hierarchy on the staff or where their powers differ, but jannies seem to be the lower level maintenance folks. Subsequent to this, the board breakdowns for forum assignments was also extracted. There will be a lot more to come of this for some of the people as they've been doxed and some have fairly sordid online histories. Strangely, a significant number of these people used emails attached to institutional addresses. Mostly edu suffixes.
The moderator forums discussions have been leaked, spanning from 2006 to 2024. I have not surveyed them much and am not likely to, so there is no way I can assess if this is a complete log archive or just some highlights. The list I have access to may actually continue to grow and may find its way to a torrent after completion. Crowdsourcing will mean most of the interesting bits will end up finding their way to me eventually, if they're interesting enough. If somebody posts a transcript and it's somewhere I can link it, then I'll update later.
I don't really know the soijak crew, nor even their reputation. Seems to be a mostly young out-group from 4chan that had some serious grievances with the moderation. From what I've seen, their grievances were entirely justified and 4chan was following the exact model as other social sites. Fill the moderation team with activists who have at least one disabling neurological or emotional condition, put a few ideologues at the helm, and let nature take its course to undermine the viability of the site as a meeting place for those ejected from the public square over politics. Intentionally not moderating disruptive behaviors that derail discussions between those of opposing political views to the moderator, banning posters over personal ideological beliefs, and aiding bad actors in a number of forum subversion techniques, has been transparent on 4chan for a long time.
This is not new and has been ongoing for years, but the liberal intelligentsia and their faithful sycophants will tell you it doesn't happen. If anything, this is tapering off as the goals have been achieved. This is totally organic though, driven by market forces or some other unquantifiable events that cannot be statistically correlated to it, and has nothing to do with a coordinated effort to shift the Overton window on Western society. Culture just changes and nobody in government has any influence over those changes. The same people that tell you this is organic and unconnected to government will also tell you how important it is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars supporting ideologue activists. They support politicians that dedicate enormous amounts of time legislating the micromanagement of emerging cultural mores. They argue that failing to spend this money and create this legislation means that societal changes will never happen. Good luck getting an answer about why these two entirely incompatible ideas are part of the DNC platform. Add it to the list of entirely incompatible policy platforms they have had in the past decade.
4chan has a long history of outages and attacks. It's entirely possible it will return in the coming weeks. Since putting the server back online without upgrades would almost certainly result in another immediate hack, they're probably going to need to need time for upgrades and some auditing. It may be that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. There is probably going to be some life disruption for those involved, on both sides, and 4chan may have trouble even attracting mods unless they make significant changes to their org charts and SOPs.
There's unlikely to be a real successor to 4chan. Just like MPP popped up as an answer to the failures of larger sites, the imageboard space is populated mostly by small sites with limited traffic and/or niche topics.
I am not at liberty to discuss my sources, but this isn't really important news and is in chitchat for those that might be interested. A couple of my routine sources are covering it and likely have some of those responsible in their orbit, but there's a relatively small pool that's reliable for things of this nature and they're not very far removed from each other. New sources I've tapped for this are probably only one step removed from the direct source of the leak. Caveat emptor.
The hack exploited PDF vulnerabilities. A malicious package was uploaded and, due to another vulnerability in the application that processes PDFs for a thumbnail display, the hacker was able to get access. This wasn't just a simple script kiddie hack like the ATS profile editor, but depended on a couple vulnerabilities and crossed over into the real back end of the system. It seems like most of them were third-party solutions that weren't properly updated, patched, or replaced. Not sure on that last part, but seems to be the case. I think there may have been one issue in the proprietary code exploited too, but I'm guessing those were fairly numerous and mostly not directly implicated in the breach.
The source code has been leaked and I don't think it would be inaccurate to say that 4chan was suffering from the same type of technical difficulties as ATS. Not to the same degree as ATS, but 4chan had a much larger user base of potential hostiles that could exploit their spaghetti code and out of date support applications. They kept up better than ATS out of necessity, but it was obviously not adequate to protect against the threat levels they faced.
The screen names and email addresses of mods and jannies have been leaked. I'm not sure the hierarchy on the staff or where their powers differ, but jannies seem to be the lower level maintenance folks. Subsequent to this, the board breakdowns for forum assignments was also extracted. There will be a lot more to come of this for some of the people as they've been doxed and some have fairly sordid online histories. Strangely, a significant number of these people used emails attached to institutional addresses. Mostly edu suffixes.
The moderator forums discussions have been leaked, spanning from 2006 to 2024. I have not surveyed them much and am not likely to, so there is no way I can assess if this is a complete log archive or just some highlights. The list I have access to may actually continue to grow and may find its way to a torrent after completion. Crowdsourcing will mean most of the interesting bits will end up finding their way to me eventually, if they're interesting enough. If somebody posts a transcript and it's somewhere I can link it, then I'll update later.
I don't really know the soijak crew, nor even their reputation. Seems to be a mostly young out-group from 4chan that had some serious grievances with the moderation. From what I've seen, their grievances were entirely justified and 4chan was following the exact model as other social sites. Fill the moderation team with activists who have at least one disabling neurological or emotional condition, put a few ideologues at the helm, and let nature take its course to undermine the viability of the site as a meeting place for those ejected from the public square over politics. Intentionally not moderating disruptive behaviors that derail discussions between those of opposing political views to the moderator, banning posters over personal ideological beliefs, and aiding bad actors in a number of forum subversion techniques, has been transparent on 4chan for a long time.
This is not new and has been ongoing for years, but the liberal intelligentsia and their faithful sycophants will tell you it doesn't happen. If anything, this is tapering off as the goals have been achieved. This is totally organic though, driven by market forces or some other unquantifiable events that cannot be statistically correlated to it, and has nothing to do with a coordinated effort to shift the Overton window on Western society. Culture just changes and nobody in government has any influence over those changes. The same people that tell you this is organic and unconnected to government will also tell you how important it is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars supporting ideologue activists. They support politicians that dedicate enormous amounts of time legislating the micromanagement of emerging cultural mores. They argue that failing to spend this money and create this legislation means that societal changes will never happen. Good luck getting an answer about why these two entirely incompatible ideas are part of the DNC platform. Add it to the list of entirely incompatible policy platforms they have had in the past decade.
4chan has a long history of outages and attacks. It's entirely possible it will return in the coming weeks. Since putting the server back online without upgrades would almost certainly result in another immediate hack, they're probably going to need to need time for upgrades and some auditing. It may be that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. There is probably going to be some life disruption for those involved, on both sides, and 4chan may have trouble even attracting mods unless they make significant changes to their org charts and SOPs.
There's unlikely to be a real successor to 4chan. Just like MPP popped up as an answer to the failures of larger sites, the imageboard space is populated mostly by small sites with limited traffic and/or niche topics.
