4chan Launches '$20 Bug Bounty' After Hackers Ruin moot's Day

mask.of.sanity (1228908) writes "4chan's founder Moot has launched a bug bounty for the site after it was hacked, but is offering a meager $20 in 'self-serve ad spend' for all bugs. The bounty program was launched after the website and Moot's Amazon accounts were hacked. The intrusion spelled the end for DrawQuest which was closed after Moot decided it was not worth spending money to ensure the unprofitable but popular drawing platform was secure."

/b

[Anonymous Coward]

b all you can b

Re:/b

[Richy_T]

b all you can b

Done.

Re:let me be the first to say

[Anonymous Coward]

He's dealt with its community with astounding elegance. And never bowed down and cashed out like Slashdot did.

I'm sure more than one moneyman waved a check at him thinking he had an idea of how to monetize the site. Selling it to a corporation would mean instant death (no corporate structure would deal with such an army of crazy people)

In any case, who the fuck are you to call him a loser?

Re:

[lagomorpha2]

Selling it to a corporation would mean instant death (no corporate structure would deal with such an army of crazy people)

Actually that's probably prevented many from offering. Being in charge of 4chan would likely be a liability disaster for an actual corporation. Certainly more trouble than it's worth.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Random Inc, you bought 4chan last week. What does it feel like to support child molesters, beastiality, rape, suicide, and other obscene acts?

I mean, their choices would be to moderate the community(in which case the community would vanish), or to acknowledge and remain laissez-faire to the fact that 4chan hosts a hoard of illegal content.

Re:

[slashmydots]

Finally, a comment from someone who actually knows something about 4chan.

Re:

[slashmydots]

Well you have a point except for the fact that no it isn't.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

r u a moran? They have a shit-ton of janitors now -- CP is non-existent enough I am comfortable browsing /b/ on my work computer.

Re:

[mythosaz]

Were the hell do you work?

Re:

[Pope]

So, Random Inc, you bought 4chan last week. What does it feel like to support child molesters, beastiality, rape, suicide, and other obscene acts?

I mean, their choices would be to moderate the community(in which case the community would vanish), or to acknowledge and remain laissez-faire to the fact that 4chan hosts a hoard of illegal content.

Oh, so Reddit?

Re:let me be the first to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. Reddit literally censors itself from 'controversial' topics, such as Snowden leaks, because they feel it would 'distract' the reader base. I am done with that place, they are only interested in circle jerking pre approved topics and lines of thought. The beauty of 4chan is that there is no moderation at all, you pretty much have to read everyone's crappy opinion, or you can just leave the site. This forces you to take every post rather skeptically, and detaches ego from content, meaning you might actually come across a solid argument, and even learn something or change your mind for the better (or worse) in the process.

Re:

[bhcompy]

Well, more like post-acquisition they were forced to close more or less legal but highly unethical/questionable subreddits because massive media companies like Conde Nast can't be bothered with accusations that they allow things like jailbait photos on their websites.

It's pretty similar to Fark, as well, since Fark had to make the site safe for work in order to keep advertisers and to get on shows like Jeopardy. Now, Reddit gets on Jeopardy despite having dedicated not safe for work content, but it's ba

Re:

[locopuyo]

Reddit is comprised by a very high percentage of emotional young people. Reddit's voting system ensures that every post complies with its emotional teen hive mind. It is rare you find any valuable discussions on Reddit because the voting system turns everything into a circle jerk.

Visit Reddit if you want to know what the hive mind is thinking,

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

"4chan hosts a hoard of illegal content"

Doesn't everyone.

Google probably has fifty thousand times more illegal content on it's servers, but my guess is that it would not apply by volume, then again I could be wrong.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, you have no idea what you're talking about. The whole "HUR 4CHAN IS EVIL" thing is essentially a forced meme among communities of kids like Gamefaqs or Reddit. They act like it's Valley of Defilement from Demon's Souls, in that the second you walk in there's a bunch of once-human monsters covered in toxic goo and their own feces who want nothing more than to club you to death, when really it's nothing like that.

What I remember 4Chan for are things like Katawa Shoujo, or the group on /vr/ that occa

Re:let me be the first to say

[TangoMargarine]

Your use of "fagtards" makes me suspect you are yourself a member of the group you're criticizing.

Re:

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's interesting that, out of all the invective he spewed, that is what you focused in on like a laser. Well, a Pavlovian dog with a laser attached to its head, the ringing bell being the word "fag", this decades' tsk-tsk word on the euphamism treadmill. I've lived long enough to see "don't use retard" go through two full cycles now, it first being beaten out of conversation as a casual derrogation in the 1970s before making a comeback 10 years ago.

It's ironic that a 4channer might reply to him with a mes

Re:

[JudgeFurious]

We're all just a bunch of "slashfags" anyway. Who are we to criticize? I tried to explain the weird evolution of the word "fag" to a friend and he didn't get it at all. There are people today who use the word in a way that has nothing to do with homosexuality (just as oddly enough it long ago had nothing to do with homosexuality) "oldfag", "newfag", 'bfag" or "btard" more commonly get people all riled up about the rampant homophobia (or political incorrectness where "tard" is concerned) but don't seem to ge

Re:

[TangoMargarine]

I guess my reasoning was that other than "basement-dwelling neckbeard fagtards," all of the other things on the list are actually illegal, not commentary on (condemnation of) someone's law-abiding lifestyle.

Okay, maybe not being a "weirdo" in reasonable cases...and being an asshole or troll can get you in trouble if you do it in court...but yeah. Taking the Urban Dictionary definition of "doxing" as "when a person is 'doxed', all their personal information is made available for all users to see," I wouldn't

Re:

[slashmydots]

Uhhh no, I'm classier than that. I troll and screw with people in MMOs, okay? Not the garbage pit that is 4Chan. I have standards FFS.

Re:

[ultranova]

This poor, virginal loser didn't try to create the internet's most purposefully asinine userbase.

"Virgin" is to Internet Tough Guys what "whore" is to fundamentalists: a supposedly devastating insult shaming its victim forever. What neither of you seem to comprehend is that whether one has never had sex or is being paid for it, it's the people who insist on bringing the matter up at otherwise non-sexual contexts who come across as creepy perverts.

That, or someone got banned.

Re:

[i kan reed]

I was just being facetious. Didn't take, though. I thought half the point of moot was to mock him.

Re:let me be the first to say

[TangoMargarine]

Free speech is messy. Completely free speech is completely messy.

Hail Eris

Details of hack?

[marcello_dl]

Login: moot
Password: umad?

Re:

[holostarr]

If anyone is interested, here are the details: http://chrishateswriting.com/ [chrishateswriting.com]

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not his password! Everyone knows moot's password is "Ep8pui8Vw2"!

I'm surprised

[GoCrazy]

That he's providing a monetary incentive at all. People would probably do it for free.

Re:

[Darinbob]

It doesn't seem monetary though. I can't figure out what the rewards really are because I don't speak that language. "Advertisement credits"? What the heck is that? Or 4chan subscription for a year, I had assumed it was free.

Parameterized

[tepples]

In the vast majority of cases, escaping is not the best solution to prevent a Bobby Tables attack. Instead, switch to a database API that supports prepared statements with named parameters. For example, in PHP, switch from the deprecated original MySQL extension (no prepared statements) or MySQLi (positional parameters only, variadic binding difficult) to PDO (named parameters, variadic binding easy).

Re:

[abirdman]

According to the description I read on a link above, the unescaped sql (and hence the injection vector) was a one-off administration page the intruder found by poking around on the disk. A mistake, but not quite as bad as leaving the error on a published page.

Is 4chan really unprofitable? Sounds like a myth

[mTor]

Recent hack, the one that has prompted this change in policy and security issues reward process, revealed that 4chan sold about 12740 passes [imgur.com] this year. At the price of $20 per pass, that's about $254,800 so far. And there's also a lot of revenue coming in from advertising.

If 4chan was truly unprofitable, it would have closed years ago. Seems to me that this is just an image that the owner is trying to project.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Passes went on sale in Fall 2012, so it's been around 1.5 years for 12740 sales. Additionally, he's done a lot of 50-75% off sales (cyber monday, etc) so the actual income from passes is somewhere south of $254k. I'd guess between $100-200k, assuming the 12k sales is correct.

Then there's the processing fees and CC fees and whatnot, so maybe it's a few % less than that.

Then he has the server expenses. How much does it cost per month to run a site like 4chan? How much does cloudflare cost on a site like that?

Re:Is 4chan really unprofitable? Sounds like a myt

[mTor]

Good points on pricing! But like I mentioned, advertising is bringing in a lot of funds as well. Bandwidth is cheaper than ever these days and a lot of it is "subsidized" by Cloudflare which don't charge for bandwidth. 4chan also doesn't run on AWS/VMs (you can find pics of 4chan servers on 4chan blog). And we can tell how much Cloudflare costs: http://www.cloudflare.com/plan... [cloudflare.com]

So I still don't see why, after all this revenue, the site would be unprofitable. It's not like moot has a large dev team behind it.

Re:

[Lehk228]

the draw program was unprofitable, not 4chan itself.

Re:

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's a far cry from that amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, which any other web site with that kind of hit total would be trying to monetize.

But given the porn and rude-centric nature of most of the posting, it must be hard to sell advertising lest stockholders or journalists looking to muckrake open their yappers questioning why company XYZ is buying ads on "that site".

Did you ever notice when Howard Stern was on broadcast radio, as popular as he was, his ads tended to be things like lawyers and ba