Security Matters: What We Learned From the 4chan Hack

The year is 2012. People are fretting about the world ending, Whitney Houston’s death is breaking hearts, Obama is running for his second term, and London is hosting the Olympics. Also in 2012? 4chan adds the version of Ghostscript that they will use until they are hacked in 2025 – 13 years later.

4chan was down for 2 weeks following the hack, but it served a lesson that won’t be forgotten any time soon: you need to keep your site updated.

What was the 4chan Hack?

On April 14, 2025, the internet was shocked to see that 4chan, an anonymous image board, was suddenly down due to a hack. Prior to the site being taken down, there was a defunct section of the site that was showing “U GOT HACKED”. Before credit was taken for the hack, there were a lot of rumors on how it was done, including the possibility of SQL injections or a code and database leak.

Information Leaked in Hack

An anonymous user took responsibility for hacking the site. The user announced the hack on soyjak.party, a rival image board that had started as a splinter of 4chan. The hack released a large amount of information, including communication between moderators dating back to 2023 and financial records.

The hacker said that user data was safe, as the hack was “just for fun”.

How was 4chan Hacked?

There were a lot of rumors about how the hack was conducted, but the truth turned out to be really simple – and completely avoidable.

Ghostscripts is a PostScript and PDF interpreter. It’s used to read a file that is uploaded and generate a thumbnail for it. There were 2 issues here that the hacker exploited:

• They allowed PDF uploads, but didn’t verify if what was being uploaded was a PDF or not.
• Ghostscript hadn’t been updated on 4chan for over a decade, leaving an incredible amount of vulnerabilities that would have been fixed with updates.

Both of these issues are avoidable, but they weren’t, allowing the hacker to use them to their advantage. According to sources, the hacker uploaded a PostScript file full of drawing commands, which was read by Ghostscript, and allowed them to chain a privilege escalation exploit by using a misconfigured SUID binary to gain higher access.

The shocking thing about this hack isn’t that it happened, but that it would have been so easy to prevent. By neglecting to update the version of the software they were using, 4chan not only left themselves vulnerable to a hack, but destroyed trust users had with their ability to keep their information safe.

All this hacker had to do was take advantage of what 4chan hadn’t done. Updating could have prevented this from happening.

Lesson Learned: Stay Updated

It might seem inconvenient to have to make sure that all plugins/apps/code is up to date, but it’s important. This goes further than just impact the functionality of your site, it impacts the most important thing: user trust.

4chan was only really down for two weeks. Whether or not 4chan will ever be able to regain enough trust with their users to recover remains to be seen. While it seems that user data was safe – in this hack at least – the security issues that led to this hack leave a feeling of worry that user data could be accessed and doxxed.

And updating could have stopped it all before it happened.

Stay Secure

To keep both your website and your brand reputation safe, you need to make sure you’re staying up to date. Partner with Fyresite to make sure you have one less thing to worry about.