As I’m sure some readers noticed, we were temporarily offline for a few hours. Apparently, our recent article that spilled the beans on 4chan’s Facebook account compromises pissed off the lovely folks at 4chan.

The whole thing is actually kind of funny, and don’t be surprised if it happens again as a result of this article: you know who to blame in that case. But we can all enjoy a good laugh at a few script kiddies, right?

Phase 1: The Comments

In the article in question that sent up a red flag at the imageboard, the 4channers (whom call themselves “/b/tards” – no joke) first decided to leave vulgar comments on the article at the bottom, after discussing the publicity amongst themselves.

Thankfully, the comments here are moderated, so we weeded out the hundreds of comments that were too explicit to post. Others, as you can see, were posted anyways, even if they were wrong or obviously a 4chan inside joke.

The comments were mostly 4chan “memes”, or inside jokes native to the imageboard. Such jokes include blaming the attack on a rival website “Ebaumsworld”, the phrase “I’m 12 and what is this?” and other “we are legion” type phrases.

Phase 2: The Flooding

After the discussion of our article escalated within the 4chan community, they then decided to start flooding the site with comments both vulgar and designed to slow the page down. So we disabled comments on the article, leaving a last note to users that we did so.

The disabling of the comments allowed the moderation queue to remain clean.

Phase 3: DDoS

When the comments were disabled and there was no longer any fun in leaving them, the 4chan script kiddies then decided to whip out little Windows programs designed to flood a server or IP with large and crafted TCP packets.

In other words, a DDoS attack.

So we were DDoS attacked by a bunch of script kiddies at 4chan using prewritten Windows programs that you can just point and click to initialize.

When school started today, the attack notably disappeared. Even the big and bad 4chan “hackers” can’t escape school, presumably the sixth grade.

So that’s why we were down. DDoS attacks are nothing sophisticated, I mean even the dullards at 4chan can pull them off using “click click click” programs. But if we go down again, you know what happened.

Later, I’ll post screenshots here taken directly from the 4chan imageboard depicting such DDoS programs in action – they get off on posting their “hacker screenshots” on the board, not knowing that they are both being logged extensively (most of them are not capable of hiding behind Tor for attacks), and that an editor of ours was present on the board during the discussion thanks to Apache HTTP referrer logging fields.

That is all, keep reading The Coffee Desk! (now officially 4chan-proof!)