Notorious 4chan Forum May Be Doomed After Hack

Is 4chan gone for good? The notorious online platform is believed to have suffered a hack so severe that some are speculating it might never return. However, the details about what happened and the potential consequences are still becoming clear:

• The forum went down earlier this week, and reports of the hack soon surfaced. Wired links the breach to a rival forum called Soyjak.party. One celebratory post bragged that a hacker had been inside 4chan's system "for over a year," per TechCrunch.
• The hack goes far beyond merely taking down the site. Hackers appear to have gained access to its back-end systems and obtained information about 4chan's anonymous moderators and "janitors." The latter raises the possibility–which would be devastating to 4chan—that they could be exposed, notes Tech Crunch. Information about the site's premium users also may have been exposed.

• "It might be hard or at least painfully slow and costly for 4chan to recover from this, so we might really see the end of 4chan as we know it," UC Riverside computer science professor Emiliano De Cristofaro tells Wired.
• A post at Boing Boing by Grant St. Clair reaches the same conclusion: "With every single user of note doxxed, the site's servers decimated, and the admin team in disarray, it's unlikely 4chan will be back up soon. Or ever."
• 4chan has been linked to vile content and even mass shootings, with Vice describing it as the "internet's favorite hot spot of moral bankruptcy." A previous investigation at Wired found that moderators explicitly allow racism.

(More 4chan stories.)