A few days ago, on April 14, the infamous internet forum known as 4chan.org was subjected to a major hacking attack, which took down the site and made it inaccessible. As of this writing, the site remains down.
4chan has been embroiled in a long series of controversies since its launch in 2003. As an anonymous forum, it has developed its own unique flavor of edgy internet counterculture. You may have heard 4chan mentioned in relation to QAnon, with one anonymous user (going by “Q”) fabricating claims of a deep state conspiracy.
But 4chan isn’t the only of its kind. An anonymous user from a rival forum called soyjak.party claimed responsibility for the hack attack, and that claim was corroborated via leaked emails from 4chan administrators and moderators. Not only was 4chan taken down, but the site’s source code and user data were stolen and leaked, including user email addresses.
According to BleepingComputer, the attack was made possible by 4chan’s extremely outdated version of PHP from 2016, leaving the forum largely unprotected against various security vulnerabilities.
In recent years, the anonymous English-language forum has had more than 20 million unique visitors each month, so there are many users affected by the incident. It remains to be seen whether 4chan will recover from the attack and whether users will trust the site enough to return.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC för Alla and was translated and localized from Swedish.