The infamous online forum 4chan was compromised on Tuesday.

At the time of writing, 4chan's website was inaccessible, with social media users reporting intermittent outages spanning several hours.

TechCrunch obtained messages from a competing message board that acclaimed the intrusion, including a claim that the individual responsible for the breach had been within 4chan's system for more than a year.

Screenshots that seem to show the inside workings of 4chan were shared online. They showed what is said to be the site's backend, source code, and ways to ban users. Only the site's moderators should be able to see these things. The leaked information also had a list of people said to be 4chan moderators and 'janitors'. Janitors are users who can remove posts and discussions, but they don't have as many rights as moderators. Moderators, for example, can also see users' IP addresses.

Considering 4chan's well-documented links to political violence, this cyberattack might reveal the individuals who manage these platforms, which have become crucial hubs for alt-right movements.

TechCrunch contacted a number of the leaked email addresses and communicated with an individual associated with one of them; a 4chan administrator, speaking anonymously, expressed certainty regarding the authenticity of the leaked data and accompanying screenshots.

"I have no grounds for believing otherwise," the janitor asserted.

I'm quite surprised. 4chan's moderation team has had leaks before, but this problem is clearly much bigger," the janitor told TechCrunch. "I'm not happy about this situation. I'm sure most other people aren't either. But many of us have been doing this for a long time. Doxxing has been a common activity on 4chan for a long time, and the chance that we could be revealed has always been there.

I've been most worried about the leaked information, for clear reasons," said the janitor. "I think that the fact that 4chan was basically taken over by a hacker or hackers is probably ‘worse' than just screenshots, at least for the site to keep working."

According to the janitor, it seems the hacker acquired the personal details of 4chan Pass subscribers, individuals who compensate the site to circumvent post limitations and gain entry to a VIP forum.

4chan did not furnish a response to an email soliciting comment that was dispatched to the platform's designated press contact.

4chan is an internet forum where people can post without using their real names, and it is often seen as the negative side of the internet. It is mostly an image board where bored users try to shock each other by posting very offensive things. Sometimes, things from 4chan become popular online trends or, more seriously, hateful ideas that encourage right-wing violence in the real world.

Memes like Pepe the Frog and others first became popular on 4chan and are now everywhere online. But 4chan's biggest impact is from its political sections, where alt-right ideas can turn young people into white supremacists. QAnon, a group of far-right conspiracy theorists who support President Donald Trump, also started on 4chan.

The perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre, which claimed 51 lives, had been a habitual user of 4chan since his adolescence. In 2022, an eighteen-year-old individual fatally shot ten Black people at a Buffalo, New York grocery store; his extensive 180-page manifesto echoed the online discourse of the Christchurch assailant.