You may not have noticed, but the landscape of the internet underwent a surprising – and potentially dangerous – change yesterday with the news that 4Chan had been temporarily taken down by hackers.
The site was slow-to-impossible to load for around 24 hours, with the DDoS seemingly confirmed via 4Chan’s twitter yesterday afternoon:
Site temporarily unavailable due to DDoS -or- we figured @MasterCard, @PayPal, and #Visa were lonely.
No-one has come forward to claim responsibility for the DDoS attack that has been responsible for essentially shutting down the site’s message boards, although there is suspicion that the attack comes in retaliation against some 4Chan members’ own DDoS attacks against MasterCard, PayPal and Visa in support of WikiLeaks (“Patriotic hacktivist” the Jester has also been suggested as the culprit, although he’s seemingly denying involvement). There is also some theorizing that the DDoS attack is either self-inflicted or altogether fake.
The site is now seemingly back to full strength. It’ll be interesting to see what fall-out this has, and whether various members of anonymous go out looking for revenge. Just remember: Check your passwords, just in case.
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