4chan has come back online after Hack defeated the infamous image sharing site for almost two weeks.
The site first went down on April 14th, and the hack's director apparently leaked data, including a list of moderators and “managers” (one admin told TechCrunch he was “confident” that the leaked data was real).
4chan's expanded loss of disappearance led to at least one premature obituary, writing that journalist Ryan Broderick “has been left over for many years to the mass shooter fan club, the central node of Gamergate, and the fan club for a wide range of sticky beating around the world, as a way of being anonymous for the unregulated followers of the Internet.”
However, the 4chan team responded with X's post. “Wired says '4chan is Dead.” is that so? “
And on Friday, the site returned online. Shortly afterwards, the official 4Chan blog post for “Hackers Using UK IP Addresses” allowed access to one of 4Chan's servers using “fake PDF uploads”, and then “the majority of the database tables and 4Chan source code” gave up saying “Awcrest and awarting and 4chan have stopped.”
According to this article, the damage was “devastating.”
“In the end, this issue was caused by insufficient time available to update code and infrastructure, and years of money starving by advertisers, payment providers and service providers who succumbed to external pressure campaigns.”
The compromised server was then replaced, according to the post, but the site has new restrictions, but PDF uploads have been “temporarily” disabled, and the boards for sharing flash animations are left out offline as “there is no practical way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.”
As of Sunday afternoon, the site's status checker indicated that the board and front page were up while posts, images and thumbnails were not working.
“4chan is back,” the post said. “We can't replace other websites or this community. No matter how difficult it is, we haven't given up.”