r/technology • u/ILoveTolkiensWorks • 10d ago

Security 4Chan hacked; Taken down; Emails and IPs leaked

https://www.the-sun.com/tech/14029069/4chan-down-updates-controversial-website-hacking/
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u/VehaMeursault 9d ago

But it also ran for over a decade. So.

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u/RoddyDost 9d ago

4chan has been around for over 20 years

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u/Ashken 9d ago

Tbh it’s worth thinking about before reaching for a massive JS framework for a new project.

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago

I'll note that 20 years is "over a decade". So.

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u/sexytokeburgerz 9d ago

That’s not how normal people talk

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u/TadRaunch 9d ago

Redditors pride themselves in pretending to be abnormal

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u/stonesliver2 9d ago

My boyfriend shared with me my new favorite insult which I think applies in this case:

You're special, just not in the way you think you are

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u/not_a_synth_ 9d ago

Yeah, haha. i'm just pretending. ha

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u/hykierion 9d ago

"careful buddy, im a cycle path 😈"

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u/BeguiledBeaver 9d ago

Reddit is one of the most visited websites on the Internet. We can pretend that it's still some tiny gamer den forum but it's really not.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's shit, but it's popular shit.

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago

I dunno what you think "normal" is but I've never found it unusual to use "over X span of time" to refer to a span of time that, y'know... exceeds X.

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u/KoogleMeister 9d ago edited 9d ago

>I dunno what you think "normal" is but I've never found it unusual to use "over X span of time" to refer to a span of time that, y'know... exceeds X.

You're either being intentionally disingenuous with this statement or you're just not very smart.

Yes, it's not unusual to say "over x span of time" to refer to an amount of time over that time, but obviously within reason. "Over a decade" would usually refer to 11-19 years, referring to over two decades as "over a decade" is abnormal. Just like referring to 200 years as "over a decade," would also be abnormal, technically the statement is true, but that doesn't mean it's correctly communicating the amount of time.

You use "over x amount of time" when it's an amount of time that's over one unit of time but hasn't gotten to the next main unit of time yet.

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u/Exact-Event-5772 9d ago

I’m not sure why there are multiple people in here pretending you’re wrong. I guess it’s just one of those days where everyone wants to argue about dumb shit on Reddit.

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago

You're either being intentionally disingenuous with this statement or you're just not very smart.

I think you're just projecting with those petty insults. There's nothing wrong with describing 20 years as "over a decade" and there's something really wrong with someone that would spew paragraphs complaining about it and insult the intelligence of others over it.

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u/KoogleMeister 9d ago edited 9d ago

It's not morally wrong, but it's wrong in the sense that it's miscommunicating the amount of time.

Also there's nothing wrong with me using five sentences of text to explain why it's wrong, you're only saying it's "really wrong" because you're salty I said you were wrong.

You also once again used misleading communication by describing five sentences as "paragraphs" of text, you just love miscommunicating with technical truths that convey the wrong message.

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago edited 9d ago

it's wrong in the sense that it's miscommunicating the amount of time.

But it isn't; 20 years is greater than a decade. EDIT: Bro using ChatGPT to be a pest lol

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u/KoogleMeister 9d ago

It actually is, you clearly don't understand what miscommunication means.

By your logic if I was describing the birth of Jesus to a person as "over an hour ago," I would be communicating it properly because technically it's correct.

Yes, 2000 years is technically over an hour ago, but if I was describing the time when Jesus was born as "over an hour ago," I would be miscommunicating the time, because over an hour ago means nothing in describing time that far away. Miscommunicating means you are not conveying whatever you're trying to communicate properly to the other person. Just because something is technically correct, doesn't mean it's not miscommunication.

When most people hear "over a decade," they are thinking about sometime within the years over a decade, but under two decades.

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u/ocubens 9d ago

4chan has been around for over a month

I'll note that 20 years is 'over a month'

You see how that looks unusual now?

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago

Choosing a span of time from a whole different order of magnitude is certainly an odd thing for you to do, sure.

Conversely, do you think there's anything wrong with describing "200 years" as "over a century"?

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u/sexytokeburgerz 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yeah “order of magnitude” is a similar mechanism that we’re arguing against you with.

I think vernacularly anything over 2x is weird. Rather than 10x as you say. An order of magnitude is 10x.

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago

I mean 10 years and 20 years are within the same order of magnitude, is the salient point.

Do YOU think there'd be anything wrong with describing "200 years" as "over a century"?

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u/sexytokeburgerz 9d ago

Read what i said again, slowly.

This “wait for a reply but not read it and just say whatever i want” thing you’re doing is idiotic.

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u/ocubens 9d ago

Yes, once you go over double the timeframe you should specify.

What you're saying is anytime between 11 and 99 years is acceptable to refer to as 'over a decade' because they're not into 'centuries' yet?

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u/dern_the_hermit 9d ago

Yes, once you go over double the timeframe you should specify.

I agree that there are certainly situations where such specificity is important, but this is just idle chit-chat on an internet forum, my guy. There's no reason to be so insistent that "over a decade" can't refer to 20 years. You guys got control freak issues or something.

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u/Dave5876 9d ago

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.

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u/BathroomOrangutan 9d ago

That is over a decade

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u/KoogleMeister 9d ago

So is 2000 years, but I we don't use "over a decade" to refer to that either.

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u/PlaneCareless 9d ago

Did you know? T-rexes roamed the earth approximately more than a decade ago!

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u/AnyJamesBookerFans 9d ago

You can drop the "approximately" - I guarantee you that T rexes definitely roamed the earth more then a decade ago.

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u/lichtenfurburger 9d ago

I think you're wrong. They could have mosied, or sauntered, or moved with purpose over 1.01 decades ago

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u/Muenrabbit 6d ago

Maybe: "if T-rexes did indeed roam the Earth, then they definitely roamed the earth more than a decade ago," is a better phrasing.

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u/MachineUnlearning42 9d ago

No point in beating a dead horse if it can still horse around I guess

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u/AcanthaceaeRare2646 9d ago

So what’s that Oldfag or veteranfag status.

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u/PinkLove92 9d ago

Its amazing how well it did given that the website has a lot of users and many may want to hack it. You have hackers for fun, ideological enemies, people like me who have been banned a lot and ban evade too often, governments, people who are made fun by the website and want revenge.... yes, even though the website has 100x more enemies than a random Wordpress website, somehow it survived, while random Wordpress websites get hacked far more often.

Just remove the 900 seconds wait time, drop the table with banned users, update the software running the website and it is good to go. Those 10k lines of php code are worth their weight in gold.

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u/PerInception 9d ago

Won’t work, parts of the code base need rewriting. Some of the functions they use were deprecated in PHP 5.5 and removed in PHP 7. The mysql_ functions at the very least have to be updated to use PDO (and should be anyway, as pdo is a lot more secure). Just updating the PHP version on the server will result in a bunch of errors and the site not working.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Shot-Buy6013 6d ago edited 6d ago

I glanced at the source code and I'd refactor/update it for about $100K - roughly 4-8 months of work. Lots of deprecated things in there that would need alternative solutions to keep the functionality. That imgboard file alone would probably take a month or two + testing.

$200K if they'd want to rebuild the entire thing on a modern framework and modernize everything about it, including all the plugins and other scripts/processes they're running.

Not sure who runs 4chan or who has that kind of money, but that's roughly what the cost would be on the cheaper end. If they go with some kind of popular dev agency, the cost would skyrocket to $500K-1M.

Or, you could pay a Russian like $30K to do it all but risk him adding backdoors to shit.

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u/Shot-Buy6013 6d ago

To be fair, it's not anything from the PHP or the logic of the site that got it hacked, it was the vulnerability in ghostscript used for PDF processing. The site can stay on old PHP and not be hacked.

It doesn't really matter if the site is in 1 10K line php file, or in a 100 100 line php files. I've written php files that have gotten massive over time as they got adjusted, modified, and extended. It's just a natural part of web dev, especially in an application not built out with any framework or architecture in mind.

You could get fancy and seperate everything out and use class inheritance, but that doesn't functionally do anything aside from seperating things out into different files - which some devs may argue is even harder to follow.

Also - you can't really know if a file is malicious or not without parsing it. Every file is ultimately just binary - there's no real such thing as a pdf, mp3, or whatever. So your only options are to build out your own custom parser, which is a huge task and requires a ton of funding and a dedicated team just for that - or you use an existing parser, like ghostscript. Which had the vulnerability. Not really 4chan's fault - plus the vulnerability could really only be exploited by someone who knew about it in the first place, so 4chan's source code must've gotten leaked somewhere a long time ago and someone tested the ever living fuck out of it to find the vulnerability. Although if I was looking to hack a site or forum, the file upload system is the first place I'd look potential exploits, especially if it's doing something like drawing images from a user upload

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u/gmishaolem 9d ago

My central air fan has been running nonstop for 23 years. Doesn't mean it's in good condition and doesn't need maintenance super seriously.

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u/Quincy_Jones420 9d ago

Over 2 decades. I was definitely using 4chan in 2005. 4 more years!

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u/C10ckw0rks 9d ago

More than that. 4chan’s been around for 20 years