4chan hacked and down, moderator information being leaked
4chan hacked and down, moderator information being leaked
Is 4chan down? What we know amid hack reports
Update
Shortly after reports of the site being down started circulating, a user on a rival image board, [Soyjak Party], claimed credit for the hack.
"Tonight has been a very special night for many of us at the soyjak party. Today, April 14, 2025, a hacker, who has been in [4chan]’s system for over a year, executed the true operation soyclipse," the soyjack.party user who was allegedly aware of the hack said over on the competing imageboard.
Soyjack Party users shared screenshots that purport to show admin access on 4chan, conversations that took place on private message boards that were only available to moderators, and internal tools that moderators had access to that show the location, host, and IP address of 4chan users.
The Daily Dot reported that it was able to access a list of supposed contact information of 218 4chan moderators, managers, and janitors.
Over on a Discord server where parts of the 4chan staff allegedly chat, there are a lot of concerns about the alleged hack and users encouraging each other to take precautions to secure their accounts.
tech journalist Alex Goldman pointed out that there is seemingly unconfirmed buzz that some mod emails had .gov domains, which fits into the narrative that 4chan is a honeypot for federal law enforcement
there are multiple people who claim to have actually parsed through the leaked data and did not find any .gov emails. Also, why would feds trying to operate a secret honeypot use their real email addresses?
The thread shared images of the resurrected and defaced /qa/ board as well as what appear to be screenshots from 4chan’s internal moderation tools. The screenshots included discussion about why users had been banned from 4chan, pieces of its backend in phpMyAdmin (the infrastructure that runs 4chan and other forums and imageboards), and traffic stats for specific boards.
Elsewhere on the internet, someone leaked an alleged list of moderator email addresses and a portion of what they described as the “source code” for the site.
It appears that 4chan was susceptible to a hack because it was running very out of date code that contained various vulnerabilities, according to 404 Media’s look at the code and people sorting through the hack online
https://archive.is/ZOgTP (404media news)
Several screenshots showing what appears to be 4chan’s back end circulated online, showing the site’s alleged back end, source code, and templates to ban users, which would only be accessible to the site’s moderators.
TechCrunch reached out to several email addresses that were leaked and spoke to one of the people behind one of the email addresses. One 4chan janitor who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity said they are “confident” the leaked data and screenshots are “all real.”
“I have no reason to believe otherwise,” the janitor said. “I’m somewhat taken back. 4chan’s moderation team has had leaks in the past, but this is obviously an issue of greater magnitude,” the janitor told TechCrunch. “I’m not happy about the situation. I’m sure most others aren’t, either. But many of us have been doing this for a long time. Doxxing is a longstanding pastime on 4chan, and the possibility that we could be exposed has always been there.”
“I’ve been most concerned with the leaked information, for obvious reasons,” said the janitor. “I’d wager that the fact that 4chan was effectively taken over by a hacker(s) is probably ‘worse’ than screenshots, at least from the perspective of the site’s continued operation.”
The janitor also said that it appears that the hacker obtained the personal information of 4chan Pass subscribers, who are users who pay the site to bypass post counters and access a VIP board, per the janitor.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/notorious-image-board-4chan-hacked-and-internal-data-leaked/