To quote the immortal words of a well-meaning but ill-informed CNN reporter, "just who is this 4Chan?"
To paraphrase the immortal words of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, "4Chan's dead, baby. 4Chan's dead."
If you've been around on the Internet for any length of time, you've heard of 4Chan, the infamous anonymous message board that has (among other things) made groundbreaking strides in mathematics, popularized just about every meme you've seen online since its founding in 2003… oh, and radicalized thousands of young men into the alt-right. A bit of a mixed bag any way you look at it, but for good or ill, 4Chan has been a pillar of the Internet for a long time, and its recent toppling will no doubt have a seismic impact.
A rival message board by the name of Soyjak Party hacked into 4Chan just yesterday, leaking the personal details of the site's administration team as well as every user that had ever registered their email (not a requirement, but needed to access the board's 'premium' features), .gov and .edu domains among them. With every single user of note doxxed, the site's servers decimated, and the admin team in disarray, it's unlikely 4Chan will be back up soon. Or ever. Per TechCrunch:
Messages on a rival message board, which TechCrunch has seen, celebrated the hack, with one person claiming that the hacker responsible for the breach was inside 4chan's system "for over a year."
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. Also in the leaked data was a list of alleged 4chan moderators and "janitors," who are users who can delete posts and threads, but have fewer privileges than moderators, who can also see IP addresses of users, for example.
Given 4chan's known violent political ties, this cyberattack could potentially expose the people who run these forums, which have become central to alt-right movements.
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.
Goodbye and good riddance, 4Chan. This is usually where I'd wrap up with some kind of poignant statement on the ephemera of Internet culture, but I think the very last post ever made on the website serves as a beautiful eulogy all on its own:
