Infamous Internet Forum 4chan Just Got Hacked

4chan—the internet’s favorite hotspot of moral bankruptcy—has been hacked, and all its sordid behind-the-scenes information is being leaked.

The hack, which has intermittently knocked the site offline, has reportedly led to a catastrophic leak of 4chan’s back-end systems, mod tools, and a list of the site’s moderators and “janitors,” 4chan users with some moderation powers but not as many as actual mods.

Screenshots of the site’s inner workings are now tearing through the internet like shrapnel firing from an explosion in a raw sewage treatment plant.

4chan Just Got Hacked

According to one of these janitors, who spoke to TechCrunch through what we assume was a burner email account, the data leak is real. The janitor went on to argue that a few screenshots here and there are not as big a deal as the potential of 4chan being actively taken over by hackers, and suggests that it could damage the prospect of “the site’s continued operation.”

The hacker seems to have gained access to 4chan’s hosting server and then started posting images of the site’s phpMyAdmin page. Some of its mods took the necessary steps to protect their identities, while others seem to have used their primary email addresses to register.

Some of those emails were rumored to have a .edu and even a .gov tagged on to the end. However, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has since clarified that there was no truth to these reports. “The source for this claim was not legit,” he wrote on Bluesky. “I know some people are excited at the prospect of 4chan getting hacked but after spending the morning with what materials I could halfway assess as legit I am sad to report that this is a real snoozer.”

Beyond the schadenfreude lies a Pandora’s box waiting to be torn open. This breach could expose the very people who keep 4chan’s darker impulses humming along. For a site that helped birth a variety of domestic terrorists and a weaponized ideology of irony fueled by a deeply rooted sense of nihilism that has spawned so many neo-Nazis, incels, and folks who identify as both, the idea of making public the names of those who kept that factory of malcontents chugging along would certainly be something. Don’t know exactly what yet, but it would be something.

Whether this is a death knell or just another chapter in 4chan’s legacy of being the candle that attracts the internet’s shittiest moths, remains to be seen.