4chan Chronicle/The Australian Hack

2014 was marked with problems for the site. 4chan has long ago cemented a reputation of being the shithole of the Internet, and the majority of the netizens dismiss the site as such. This has led to a problematic case: Whenever someone wants to spread dirty information on someone or has data that could cause a major problem, they drop them on /b/. /b/’s culture tailored itself to encourage anything that would cause chaos (and make porn threads), while the rest of the site kept on with the general “with us or against us” mentality with rather dire consequences and strong reactions whenever moderation crackdowns happened. Several boards would end up hating moot out of misconceived ideas about the site’s purpose, and wild mass guessing and rumor spreading ran amok. A general feeling of betrayal set up on many boards, and moot gets labeled as an SJW due to his connections to the tech world and the games industry, which has mixed greatly with Internet Culture. This in turn led moot to abuse the rebelling boards. The beginning of 2015 marks the most tumultuous period in 4chan history, when 4chan’s owner and admin for 11.5 years, moot, steps down from adminhood.

Time of Troubles

(Apr 21 2014)

During mid-2014, 4chan was hacked into by a /int/ user. The hacker, who was upset over a female French tripfag FWG cutting contact with him, hacked into 4chan to obtain her information. He logged in as moot’s account and began to shitpost and insult her, then proceeded to post all her dox, including ban history, posts per IP (it turned out she samefagged and replied to her own posts constantly) address and social media accounts. Eventually he moved on to posting screenshots of /j/, the report system, the ban list from the inside, a screenshot from the #janiteam IRC and a partial list of staff members. The hacker then outed cadfael as being the /sp/ janitor, and vowed to make a second hack to dig info on him. /int/’s reaction was a complete shitstorm, and the site followed suit when news of the janitor leaks spread. Moderator reaction was to freeze the site, for 6 hours, wait for moot to get rid of the hacker and delete every screen and mention of the leaks. This of course led to a bigger Streisand effect, but the mods didn’t give deleted the leaks on sight. The drama didn’t end then, as /jp/ became aware of its resident janitor Saegrimir and /a/ doxed their janitors Troid and BigN. It is unknown if those janitors where fired, resigned or are still on the staff. It is known that Troid became a mod. However, efforts to discredit him never stopped, and a particular user has been harassing the staff demanding to demod him as later as September 2015.