The imageboard 4chan is back online after a weeks-long outage following a cyberattack. While the service has resumed, it confirmed having suffered significant impact of the incident.
4chan Restored After Cyberattack
According to its recent post, 4chan “is back” online after an (almost) deadly cyberattack on the service. The platform confirmed the service resumption after a 2-week outage, explaining all the problems it had faced to keep things going.
4chan suffered a serious cyberattack earlier this month, which even got its source code, amidst other important details, leaked online. According to users’ reports, the hacked details surfaced online on a 4chan rival forum, causing serious damage to the platform’s reputation.
Initially, the exact attack details remained unclear, leaving users and security professionals speculating about possible reasons. Some users even pointed out the use of outdated PHP versions. Besides, journalists and researchers also shared similar reports of the platform using outdated infrastructure, which caused serious damage to the platform following the hacking attack.
According to the journalist Alex Goldman, the hacked platform details even included the IP addresses associated with 4chan posts, and moderators identities.
So 4chan (the anonymous message board) was hacked. The hackers leaked the source code for the site and claim to have the IP addresses behind every post, the identities of all moderators. And it seems it got hacked because it was running on software that was a decade out of date.
Another X post user listed out even more details to have been hacked during the incident, such as email addresses.
Following the incident, the platform went offline for roughly two weeks, only to be restored recently. In its latest post, the service confirmed to be back online as their team works on restoring the infrastructure. However, they explained some changes in the meantime, such as a temporarily disabling PDF uploads. Moreover, they also confirmed that the “/f/ – Flash” board won’t return citing security reasons.
PDF uploads have been temporarily disabled on those boards that supported them, but they will be back in the near future. One slow but much beloved board, /f/ – Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.
No Timely Updates Led To The Attack – Admits 4chan
Now that 4chan has returned online, it’s still not officially confirmed how exactly the cyberattack happened on their infrastructure. Nonetheless, the platform has been pretty open about the damages it faced and the efforts put in for service restoration.
In its explanation, 4chan not only admitted running old and outdated servers, but also cited financial constraints for its inability to improve the infrastructure. They almost confirmed the community’s speculations about the use of outdated codes and servers to have been the reason behind the attack.
However, 4chan confirmed it had updated its infrastructure during the two-week outage.
We have not been idle during our nearly two weeks of downtime. The server that was breached has been replaced, with the operating system and code updated to the latest versions.
Besides, the team also confirmed hiring more volunteers to manage the platform as they continue with their services.
4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.
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