4chan goes dark as hacker breaches site and leaks user information

Infamous imageboard site 4chan was taken offline following reports that the site had been hacked with the infilatrator leaking user info.

4chan could be coming to an end. While the site spawned countless memes over the years, it’s also had its fair share of controversies related to acts of violence and its stance on censorship.

On April 15, 4chan was taken down following a massive hack in which the hacker reportedly gained shell access to the website’s hosting server.

To make matters worse, users who had their emails registered on the site appear to have been doxxed.

4chan users leaked following massive hack

As reported by Engadget, the hacker revealed emails of the site’s moderation team and many of the site’s registered users – some of which had .edu and .gov addresses.

Furthermore, Daily Dot says that a sample of the leaked data included a list of 218 moderators along with hundreds of pages of backend code with the names of users who purchased yearly subscriptions to the site.

The hack revealed that moderators had a special internal tool that let mods view the location, IP address and other info of anonymous users.

Screenshots of the admin page even show that 4chan had nearly 11M banned users.

According to a former senior threat intelligence analyst at Microsoft, Kevin Beaumont, the hack could take 4chan down for quite awhile.

Kevin Beaumont/bsky

“I suspect 4chan will be down for a while, looks like a pretty comprehensive own including SQL databases, source and shell access,” he said.

It’s not clear exactly how long the imageboard will be offline for. This hack may not be as impactful as the major Rockstar breach of 2022 in which GTA 6 videos were leaked, but for users who frequent 4chan on a regular basis, this will certainly come as a major blow.