*****, the 'internet’s litter box,' appears to have been pillaged by rival forum
Source code, moderator info, IP addresses, more allegedly swiped and leaked
Jessica LyonsTue 15 Apr 2025 // 18:56 UTC
Thousands of ***** users reported outages Monday night amid rumors on social media that the edgy anonymous imageboard had been ransacked by an intruder, with someone on a rival forum claiming to have leaked its source code, moderator identities, and users' IP addresses.
If those claims are legit, it's a big deal with potential real-world risks. ***** is known for its extremist, controversial content — everything from discussions about science and video games to fringe political conspiracies and trolling to leaked nudes, and offensive, violent words and images.
As of this writing, ***** was back online but loading slowly.
The outages, according to Downdetector, beganaround 1900 EST on April 14, with a peak of more than 1,000 user complaints. The last post before ***** went down was a
Jack Black "Chicken Jockey" meme from the Minecraft movie.
After
posting "*****, the internet's litter box, got hacked" on BlueSky, Kevin Beaumont, director of emerging threats at Arcadia Group, said he suspected the site "will be down for a while, looks like a pretty comprehensive [compromise] including SQL databases, source and shell access."
Reports from social media and forum posts suggest ***** was operating on an outdated version of PHP, the open-source scripting language used for web development. While
The Register hasn't verified the claims, it's alleged ***** was running a nearly decade-old
buggy version of PHP and used a deprecated function to interact with its MySQL database.
A ***** splinter site called soyjack party, aka sharty, claimed to be behind the security breach, and posted what they alleged was
a ton of internal data on their rival website, including source code and info on moderators and lower-level mods called janitors. The leak reportedly included [.]edu and [.]gov email addresses.
"Their board on ***** /qa/ was banned 4 years ago and so they've been biding their time, I guess. As part of the hack they reinstated their banned board. Lol,"
Xeeted journalist Alex Goldman, referring to *****'s Q&A message board.
The hack-and-leak has spurred further speculation that ***** may be a federal law enforcement honeypot, and now that some of the moderators have reportedly been doxxed, it could put them at personal risk.
***** did not immediately respond to
The Register's questions about the alleged compromised. We will update this story if and when we hear back. ®
: Source code, moderator info, IP addresses, more allegedly swiped and leaked
www.theregister.com
good for them.
