4chan is finally back up and running — mostly. The infamous imageboard initially went down two weeks ago, scattering its anonymous denizens to the winds. It has now been largely restored, with users flocking back to their familiar fetid stomping grounds. However, not all of 4chan’s boards will be returning.
In the first substantial post to its official blog in eight years, 4chan’s team confirmed speculation that the outage was due to a hacker, and that the source code had been compromised. Specifically, the blog stated that a hacker with a UK IP address was able to access 4chan’s servers by exploiting its outdated software via a PDF upload. The hacker subsequently extracted a substantial amount of 4chan’s source code, before vandalising the website and prompting moderators to shut it down.
“While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion,” read 4chan’s blog on Friday.
Calling the damage “catastrophic,” the blog stated that 4chan’s failure to update its code was due to both an “insufficient skilled man-hours available” and a lack of funds. Unsurprisingly, it seems that advertisers are leery of associating with a website commonly described as “the cesspool of the internet,” which has made acquiring the cash for new servers difficult. As such, while 4chan partially moved to new servers in the second half of last year, key functions were still being taken care of by its old hardware.
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“Everything about this process took much longer than intended, which is a recurring theme in this debacle,” wrote 4chan. “The free time that 4chan’s development team had available to dedicate to 4chan was insufficient to update our software and infrastructure fast enough, and our luck ran out.”
4chan’s two-week outage gave its development team time to patch up holes in its security, as well as start bringing on more volunteers. The blog states that 4chan’s team has since replaced the compromised server, as well as updated its software. The server status checker on 4chan’s blog indicated that full functionality has still not returned at time of writing, though posts on the imageboard largely appeared to be business as usual.
Yet despite this, 4chan won’t ever return to its former incarnation. The ability to upload PDFs is expected to return soon, having been temporarily disabled in light of this breach. However, Flash board /f/ has been killed for good since “there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.” While /f/ is currently still available on 4chan’s front page and navigation bar, it seems likely it will eventually be removed in light of this announcement.
Even without the hack, the death of /f/ was a long time coming. Adobe first announced it would stop supporting Flash Player back in 2017, finally declaring that it had reached the end of its life in 2020.
4chan has a controversial history and reputation, to put it lightly. Launched over two decades ago in 2003, the dubious internet stalwart became a breeding ground for memes, controversies, and movements such as hacktivist group Anonymous and far-right conspiracy theory QAnon.
