The founder of 4chan confirmed that the popular imageboard website, which allows users to post anonymously, was compromised by a hacker attempting to expose the posting habits of another user. The intruder confirmed this fact and stated that it was because 'they' "disliked' the target poster.

In a blog post, 4chan founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot" explains the breach: After careful review, we believe the intrusion was limited to imageboard moderation panels, our reports queue, and some tables in our backend database. Due to the way the intruder extracted information from the database, we have detailed logs of what was accessed. The logs indicate that primarily moderator account names and credentials were targeted.



Three 4chan Pass users had their Pass credentials accessed, and were notified and offered refunds and lifetime Passes shortly after the discovery. As a reminder, all payment information is processed securely by Stripe—we never see nor store any of it, and thus no payment information was compromised.

We patched the vulnerability quickly after it came to our attention, and have spent—and will continue to spend—dozens of hours poring over our software and systems to help mitigate and prevent future intrusions.

Poole goes on to apologize for the breach, vowing that they will do their best not to let it happen again.