Tear down the bunting, Tumblr users, it seems reports of 4chan’s demise were premature. Earlier in April, a hack of the infamous edgelord imageboard perpetrated by someone from a rival board called Soyjack.party forced 4chan offline and resulted in its anonymity being peeled away. Now it’s back, with a blog post explaining how the “catastrophic” damage was possible.
“While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns.”
The hack involved a “bogus PDF upload” and so PDF uploading has been temporarily disabled on the revived 4chan. The feature will return, but something else won’t. “One slow but much beloved board, /f/ – Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.”
There’s no mention made of the fact that 4chan Pass subscribers, who pay to skip CAPTCHA verification, had their personal information stolen. Which seems like a bigger problem for the site’s long-term health, given that anonymity is the whole point of 4chan. Still, the blog, hosted on 4chan’s hated enemy Tumblr, is treating its return as a victory: “4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.”
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