About

April 2025 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak refers to the Soyjak.party community's claimed hacking of 4chan in mid April 2025, which included the restoration of the deleted /QA/ board and leaking the emails of 4chan "janitors," who are members of the site's moderation team. The attackers reportedly exploited outdated PHP code and deprecated MySQL functions in 4chan's backend, particularly in a core script named yotsuba.php, which manages post submissions and moderation. A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified. The site returned 10 days later.

Origin

4chan was reportedly hacked by internet users claiming to be part of the Soyjak.Party community on April 14th, 2025. The hackers brought back the deleted /QA/ board, and temporarily granted access to 4chan's administrative site. An anonymous user posted about the hack on Soyjak.Party^[1] around 10:05 PM EST. The thread contained several bits of leaked information, a look into the /j/ board as well as the entirety of the "yotsuba.php" code, which handles features like posting and reporting. Another post in the thread claimed to be leaking the email addresses associated with various janitors, three of which were .edu emails.

Early on April 15th, 2025, KiwiFarms^[3] user Coberald posted a copy of the leaked 4chan source code. A user named Tofflenheim^[4] also shared a link to an archive^[5] of posts on /j/, a private board dedicated to janitor discussions.

Spread

X^[6] user @Priniz_twt was one of the first to post about the hack on April 14th, 2025, gathering over 5,000 likes in less than a day.

On April 14th and April 15th, 2025, X^[2] user @_yushe posted screenshots from the 4chan administrative page as well as analyzed the leaked "yotsuba.php" code, which handles features like posting and reporting. The post gathered over 500 likes in less than a day.

On April 15th, X^[7] user @_yushe noted that 4chan was likely hacked because it was using an outdated version of PHP (a coding language used to run the site), which is full of known vulnerabilities, and deprecated (no longer supported) functions to handle its database.

Also on April 14th, X^[8] user @LumpyTheCook tweeted, "Apparently 4chan is down because someone hacked the lead admin (Hiro) account and started leaking all the mod and janitor emails, contact info, chat logs, etc. Good job Hiro 👍" The thread also included the unconfirmed claim that some janitors were using .gov emails, (although some leaked lists did contained .edu emails).

On April 15th, 2025, Redditor /u/Meteorstar101 posted to the /r/greentext subreddit,^[9] writing, "Last posts before 4chan got hacked," and showing the Chicken Jockey meme.

4chan's Return

On April 25th, 2025, 4chan went back online. Reactions quickly surfaced on the /r/4chan^[10] subreddit and on X.^[11]

Search Interest

External References