Hiroyuki's '4chan' was hacked on a large scale and went down, with administrator's email address also leaked


by fk you

4chan, the largest image bulletin board in the English-speaking world owned by Hiroyuki Nishimura, was taken offline around April 14, 2025 after what appeared to be a large-scale hacking attack, resulting in the leaking of email addresses and source code of members believed to be administrators. In connection with this, a user of Soyjak.party, an image bulletin board derived from 4chan, claimed responsibility for the attack.

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The problem reportedly began around 19:00 ET on April 14, 2025 (8:00 a.m. Japan time on the 15th), when many users began reporting problems connecting to the site.

Later, on the message board Soyjak.party, commonly known as The Party, a user going by the handle Chud posted, 'Tonight was a special night for many at the soyjak party. Today, April 14th, 2025, a hacker who had been in the 4cuck (a derogatory term for 4chan) system for over a year executed the true operation 'soyclipse,' reopening /qa/, exposing personal information of various 4cuck staff members, and leaking code from the site.'

'4chan got hacked by sharty (alias for Soyjak.party), /QA/ was restored, admin passwords and IRC were leaked, and the site is slow to respond. This is huge,' wrote one X (formerly Twitter) user.



Soyjak.party is an imageboard dedicated to the Soyjak meme, and saw a surge in users after the Soyjak community took over 4chan's question and answer forum, /qa/, and took it down.

Journalist Alex Goldman explains, 'From what I can see, this hack appears to be a retaliatory attack by a 4chan offshoot called the 'soyjack party' (aka sharty). Their message board on 4chan's /qa/ was shut down four years ago, and they were waiting for the right moment to exact revenge. As part of the hack, they resurrected the closed message board lol.'



Soyjak.Party exposed the code for 'yotsuba.php,' which is responsible for functions such as posting to 4chan, as well as several email addresses purportedly belonging to the site's administrator.

According to X users who analyzed the leaked code, 4chan was running an old version of PHP that contained many known vulnerabilities and exploits, and the hack may have been caused by processing the database using deprecated functions that are no longer supported.



The hack further fueled long-held speculation that 4chan was a decoy for law enforcement, as the leaked administrator data included .edu email addresses provided by educational institutions, as well as unconfirmed reports that some .gov email addresses suggested government personnel.

However, Jared Holt of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank, said, 'This claim is not true. I spent this morning looking at what I thought were semi-legitimate documents, and I'm afraid to report they're pretty boring.'

I know some people are excited at the prospect of 4chan getting hacked but after spending the morning with what materials I could halfway assess as legit I am sad to report that this is a real snoozer.

— Jared Holt ( @jaredlholt.bsky.social ) April 15, 2025 23:29



4chan was taken offline for a while but has since reopened, but as of the time of writing, it is still intermittently difficult to connect to.

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in Web Service,   Security, Posted by log1l_ks