4chan, which was taken down by a massive hack, has finally returned, citing 'long-standing financial and personnel difficulties' as the cause


by kevin

The overseas Internet bulletin board 4chan was down due to a large-scale hacking attack on April 14, 2025, but was partially restored about two weeks later on April 27. The 4chan development team explained that the reason for such a large-scale security incident was 'financial difficulties and a lack of manpower.'

Still standing - 4chan Blog
https://blog.4chan.org/post/781845918774394880/still-standing

4chan is back online, says it's been 'starved of money' | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/27/4chan-is-back-online-says-its-been-starved-of-money/

At around 7 p.m. on April 14, 2025, a problem occurred with connecting to 4chan. This was due to a large-scale hack by an image bulletin board community that had been banned from 4chan, which led to the source code of the bulletin board function 'yotsuba.php' being leaked, as well as the email addresses of several administrators being leaked.

Hiroyuki's '4chan' was hacked on a large scale and went down, and the administrator's email address was also leaked - GIGAZINE



4chan is an anonymous message board site that was founded under the influence of Japan's Futaba Channel . 4chan is the largest source of Internet memes in the English-speaking world, and a place where topics related to anime, manga, and Japanese subculture are widely discussed. However, it has also become a hotbed of racism and sexism, and has been considered problematic for hosting many white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and conspiracy theorist communities.

In response to the large-scale hack that took 4chan down for a long period of time, tech culture media Wired published an article titled ' 4chan is dead. Its toxic legacy is everywhere .' In response, 4chan responded on X (formerly Twitter) with, 'Wired says '4chan is dead.' Is that true?'



Then, on Friday, April 25, 2025, the 4chan development team posted an article titled 'Still Standing' on their official blog.

According to the article, not all of 4chan's servers were breached, but a 'hacker using a UK IP address' used a 'fake PDF upload' to access one of 4chan's servers and began vandalizing 4chan, including stealing database tables and most of 4chan's source code. At this point, moderators noticed and the 4chan server was taken down, preventing further access.

4chan's development team said, 'Ultimately, the problem stemmed from a lack of skilled resources to update our code and infrastructure, and from years of financial difficulties as advertisers, payment providers and service providers caved in to outside pressures.'

4chan, acquired by 2channel founder Hiroyuki, is in danger of being shut down due to lack of funds - GIGAZINE



According to 4chan's development team, the server was purchased second-hand in 2015 by founder moot just before he retired as administrator, and they had been considering replacing the server, but it ended up taking years to raise the funds to finance new equipment, and they were only able to start work on drawing up specifications for a new server in late 2023.

The specifications were agreed upon in April 2024, and the new servers were put online in July, but the migration process was underway, with key functions still relying on the old servers. The slow progress of the migration led to the hack, the 4chan development team said, 'The free time available to the 4chan development team on 4chan is insufficient to quickly update our software and infrastructure, and our luck has run out.'

During the two-week downtime, the compromised servers were replaced and the OS and code were updated to the latest versions. However, it was announced that the ' /f/ - Flash ' site, which handles Flash videos, would not be reactivated because similar attacks using SWF files were expected.

4chan's development team said, '4chan is back. No website can replace 4chan and this community. No matter how hard it is, we will not give up.'

Related Posts:

in Web Service,   Security, Posted by log1i_yk