On the 14th of April, the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. 4Chan had been hacked. While it has been hacked before, none of them have ever been this devastating. The Source code has been leaked, the private administration chat and tools leaked, the back-end infrastructure leaked, everything to keep the website operational was compromised. The source code has already been combed and fresh exploits and security holes have been discovered. To bring it back to a viable state would require a full re-write of the source code and overhaul of all back-end software, with a website that makes little profit and an owner that doesn’t care, I truly believe this could be the end of 4chan.
If you search the mainstream media they will say this hack was carried out by a “Rival Internet Faction”. They are far more interesting than that and no where near a rival. Long ago in the distant past of 2017, Pepe the Frog was the face of 4chan with his sidekick Wojak. He had reached his zenith with the election of Donald Trump and his star was beginning to fade, but Wojak had just begun. In the Autumn of 2017 the Soyboy meme was born and with it Wojak had transformed into Soyjak.
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From there the meme spread like wildfire to every corner of the website, overrunning boards with spam and taking over a little used help section named /qa/. The Moderators and despised Jannies began banning every edit and variation of soyjak the could find. The word soy was automatically changed to onions, a measure still in place as of the 13th of April. Eventually they were contained in /qa/ and spread from there with constant, unhinged evolution and variations of the meme. And from 2017-2021 the site became constant spam of soyjaks. They had become unavoidable, the moderation team stopped the spam but they were too prevalent to remove. But in 2021 they had become too bold. The began a constant 3 day raid on the /lgbt/ board spamming gore, scat and post-transition surgery scars. If anything upsets moderators, its attacking their precious LGBTQA+ community (Deranged Cross-Dressers and Transexuals).
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For this act, /qa/ was shut down and banished to a smaller chan-style website named soyjak.party (A.K.A The Sharty). Most splinter chans die off within a few months or are a husk with single digit users. But the Sharty thrived. Creating an archive of their twisted creations and growing it named Soybooru. There are far too many interpretaions and offshoots to discuss in this piece so I wont even begin to try. But like a Palestinian Refugee, they never stopped claiming their promised land of /qa/.
On the 14th of April. An announcement was made the Sharty that one of their members had gained access to 4chan through an unchecked PDF upload that converted to ghostscript and executed a command on the server. From there he escalated privledges through phpmyadmin server that hadn’t been updated since 2012. This is all rectified by standard security measures and knowing this it is more surprising that it hadn’t happened sooner. From there the hacker known by the name COBERALD, did his victory lap, he played bit-tune music on every page, he pretended to be the owner and spammed racial slurs and to cap it all off, he reactivated /qa/ as the users of the sharty celebrated. After 9 hours, the servers were manually shut down. After the fun was had he then released the personal email addresses of all the Admins, Moderators and Jannies. Jannies for those who do not know are unpaid, assistant moderators that work for free, they get a power trip from banning people as they have no power in their personal lives. They are despised and ridiculed by all users and collectively deserve this. The many enemies they have made with their petty behaviour, are now attempting to de-hash their passwords for more potential enjoyment. The moderators and Jannies have been told they need to keep these leaked emails to resend them a password reset when they eventually get everything up and running again. If ever.
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As of now the future is unclear. There has been no official news form the owner or any associates. The user base of the website is a shadow of its former self. Even if it returns it is now vulnerable and will probably wither and die from more attacks or be sold off to someone who will take away the freedom that made it worthwhile to begin with, The old days of an unstoppable anonymous are long gone, the /b/ board had degraded into porn addiction years ago, /pol/ has re-migrated to other sites, while becoming jaded after years of being an intelligence agency honeytrap. The other boards who could do something with a sizable userbase such as /g/ and /v/ have very little loyalty after years of mistreatment by Jannies. Only time will tell but this really could be it. The users of the Sharty celebrate unopposed. For the Sharty this influx of traffic is a bang, but for 4 chan it would be a whimper, to symbolize how far the mighty have fallen, below is possibly the last post made on 4chan, a bad joke about the Minecraft movie.
© Toddy47b 2025
