Given the language in this announcement that lays blame at everyone else's feet except the people responsible for maintaining the platform, I'm pretty sure that no lessons were learned, and that the security is not likely to improve beyond whatever bandaids that were needed to address this hack.
In software outdated dependencies are vulnerabilities. The tech leadership knew this tradeoff and closed their eyes and hoped they'd get to it before someone else did. They did not and you shouldn't expect to be able to either.
If you do not have the resources to support the continual, ongoing updating of a dep, you do not the resources to add said dep.
I don't think advertisers, payment providers, service providers, or hardware vendors told 4chan what version of OpenBSD to run or how often to update packages. Those are tasks that require time and effort, yes, but they're not herculean. They could have been done. I think laziness and disinterest are the more likely reasons.
I have never heard of a bank’s core mainframes being hacked in the last decade (outside of pen tests), even for mid size banks outside the global top 100.
"I'm pretty sure that no lessons were learned." I would bet that was the case.
Wow, this is a pretty incredible level of incompetence. Server-side SWF exploits are easily mitigated, unless they are using some sort of server-side SWF interpreter, which is absolutely not needed if you implement client-side Ruffle (or just require people to install the browser extension).
They can complain all they want that advertisers and payment processors refuse to work with them, but it's clear that no competent engineers want to work with them either if they're saying stuff like this.
> Ruffle
Yes, they used that. Take a look at the board.
I remember visiting the site as a teenager to check rage comics, and even for the abrasion of the internet of the time it was too shocking for anything beyond an occasional look - random gore, pictures of underage girls, racist tirades and the like.
I know some people enjoy that Wild West, lack of rules environment for some reason, but is there any content that’s worth it for those who don’t?
Like the ACLU used to do, we should help them stay online and exercising their free speech, even if it is annoying and gross.
Excellent, now we can ban speech we don’t like by just saying it doesn’t actually express a point of view
If 4chan were taken down by government action, I might be inclined to speak up for them in some capacity, as I don't consider that anything 4chan is currently doing illegal, but that's not the situation here. If 4chan dies because it's a poorly-managed shithole with no allies, then we can and should let it die, and rest easy knowing that it wasn't censored, it collapsed under it's own debt.
I'd be more interested knowing which package was vulnerable?, was it a known exploit?, and what systems were/are in place to alert on vulnerable dependencies?. Instead they are focused on the new servers just taking too long and not enough money because of advertiser pressures.
If that's were case, it would be easy to see how they might want to tie their OS upgrade to a hardware refresh rather than taking servers offline for a reinstall.
It won't matter for long though. The userbase has had its trust shattered, and this blogpost makes it clear that 4chan has no ability to defend itself from future attacks, which are absolutely coming.
I think it’s moreso that when a normal person enters 4chan they either decide to get out while they still can or stay and become whatever the opposite of a “normie” is.
Wouldn’t say the latter sounds like it would be worth it at all though.
They should, in fact, give up and use the time for literally anything else.
