4chan Was Apparently Hacked Data And Source Code Taken

4chan was apparently hacked. The attacker put the website lame and captured source code as well as sensitive data such as email addresses from moderators. The site is currently down, various speculations are circulating on the background on social media.

Massive hack places 4chan Lahm

The controversial message board platform 4Chan has not been available since the early morning of April 15, 2025. According to the fault report website Downdetector more thousands of users reported problems with access to the site. The disorders started around 4 a.m. and mainly concern the website itself, which is responsible for 71 percent of the reported problems. The background is apparently a serious hacker attack.

Attacker who supposedly the Soyjak.party community belong, access to the administration area of ​​the platform and captured sensitive data got access to the administration area. The security gap was probably made possible by outdated PHP code and no longer supported MySQL functions in the backend of 4Chan, especially in a core script called Yotsuba.php, which is responsible for the management of contributions and moderation tasks.

Numerous posts are spreading on the incident on social media such as X (formerly Twitter). Users report that the hackers have published email addresses and contact information from administrators and so-called “Janitors” (voluntary moderators) and internal chat protocols. Particularly explosive: Under the leaked e-mail addresses, those with .DU- and .gov endings should also be located, which could indicate connections to educational institutions and government agencies-but of course these are “only” email addresses.

The X-user @_yushe shared as one of the first analyzes of the leaked source codes and explained that 4chan was probably hacked because it used an outdated PHP version that is full of known security gaps and used outdated (no longer supported) functions to manage the database. The attackers have also restored the deleted /QA /board and temporarily granted access to the 4Chan administration page. 4chan was founded in 2003 by the then 15-year-old Christopher Poole (known as “Moot”). The platform was originally intended for discussions about anime and manga, but developed into a controversial forum over the years.

Since Poole’s departure in 2015, when he moved to Google, no significant work has been carried out on the website. In the past, the platform was involved in numerous controversy, including the gamergate in 2014, in which misogynistic messages and defamation campaigns against women were spread in the gaming scene. Leaking intimate photos of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence is also one of the biggest scandals in the platform.