Hackers are taking credit for getting inside the online 4chan message board, which experienced operating issues overnight.
The website DownDetector.com showed significant reporting of user complaints beginning Monday at around 10:30 p.m. ET. The difficulties appeared to decline by Tuesday morning, though several hundred reports were still being registered before noon. Many of the issues reported were in the New York area.
4chan famously operates with little transparency even by social media standards, which makes it a popular platform for users seeking anonymity. As such, it can be used to disseminate what the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes as “extremely high levels of hateful rhetoric, including racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, white supremacy and antisemitism.”
A hacker collective calling itself the Soyjak Party claimed late Monday night it had infiltrated 4chan’s systems and could leak coding information from the site and personal information about its staff.
“Tonight has been a very special night for many of us at the soyjak party,” the alleged hackers posted on their own site.
The group claimed 4chan’s administrators were forced to take the site offline to mitigate the damage, but cited “unconfirmed reports that the servers have already been completely compromised and may not be up for some time.”
The Soykjak Party’s claim couldn’t immediately be authenticated. 4chan hasn’t addressed the matter.
Some commenters on Soyjak.st claiming to be 4chan users wondered if their email addresses and posting history could be made public. Others expressed optimism over the possibility of learning the identities of 4chan operators they accuse of over-regulating content.
“Is there a way to see if they had a ‘shadowban’ capability?” wondered a commenter on the Soyjak site. “I always suspected they did because no one ever replies to me.”
To what extent 4chan’s security may have been compromised is unclear.