Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic." In a statement released on Saturday, the .org's official blog site said "a hacker using a UK IP address" was to blame for the intrusion, which led to vast amounts of important data being stolen. It …
... OG users [we go by an NSFW moniker that I'll avoid using here] of that esteemed resource I think this whole affair is hilarious. At the same time as being really quite serious, given the influence that /b/ in particular has had on mainstream culture, nothing of value was lost.
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Attacking 4chan is trivially easy. They are so very naughty in so very many ways. Hmm. Kiddie porn... Hmm. Racist porn. Hmm. Facist porn... Hmm. Mass piracy...
They went out of their way to irritate a lot of people. One or more of those irritated did something to them. I suspect that whoever it was would have tried something, even if 4chan had had nice shiny new hardware and up-to-date software, it'd just have been harder to do. This is an absolutely classical example of Fuck Around and Find Out.
Why the rambling about server hardware? I manage to keep my servers up to date without buying new hardware.
It’s a great distraction of course, but there is no excuse for running 10+ years old unpatched versions of ghostscript on your internet facing servers. None.
Yeah, one of them turned up on one of the FreeBSD mailing lists blaming FreeBSD for being "insecure" (he was a bit more vocal in his phrasing) And it turns out they were running 3ed party programs 10 YEARS out of date LOL. I wonder which version of FreeBSD they were running? No doubt some version that was deprecated many years ago. I bet it was 10.0 :-)
"Few companies were willing to sell us servers". Yeah right... It would be trivial to order them in your name and have the business reimburse you, and it costs next to nothing to incorporate a dummy company to buy the stuff if don't want the purchase in your name.
Now sure recurring services like hosting would be a lot harder to get because they can SEE exactly what your servers are hosting and if it doesn't fit their rules they'll kick you out. But a server vendor like HP doesn't know what use you're putting the servers to and even if you bought them as "4chan inc" the order process is probably so automated they'd never know and even if there are a few people in the loop they may have no idea who that is. And probably don't have any corporate rules about how they can and can't sell to, other than sanctioned countries like North Korea.
It might be that "Few companies were willing to sell us servers" actually means "Few companies were willing to sell us servers at the price we were willing to pay, £16.32 a unit. We'd skip our McD Kid's Meal dinner that night and sacrifice for the cause, Mom could just make us Mac & cheese."
Is no one wondering why an organisation with no money and seemingly no influence on the general population is attacked? Is it being investigated? Might be interesting if not a disgruntled member. What's the deal with 4chan, I had a quick look, seems like an old style notice / image board?
> Is MySpace still online? Is 4chan?
Or you could try them. You won't catch the clap.
My{gag}Space has a busy front-page compositor, and seems to be connected with many of its descendants.
4Chan did come back up (ye of little faith) and faster now (or is that fewer SWF and thin upload queues?). 4Chan is what you want it to be. Offensive politics, racist rants, threats, poor porno. It kinda sets a lower bound on the stupidity of the internet, lower even than BoredPanda and ICanHasCheez. For that alone it is valuable, even though the actual value is zero.
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