4Chan launches embarrassing attack on devout Christians on Facebook

http://thenextweb.com/2009/08/22/4chan-launches-attack-christian-evangelists-facebook/

by mgcreed • 17 years ago

68 117 17 years ago

thenextweb.com

spooneybarger2• 17 years ago

this is simultaneously awful and hilarious.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

But mostly hilarious.

unalone3• 17 years ago

My biggest problem with 4chan is that despite knowing they're doing awful things and inflicting pain on people who don't deserve it, they still manage to be really funny and so I lose the will to strongly condemn them.

noodle2• 17 years ago

every once in a while they do get someone in their crosshairs that does deserve it, though.

angstrom4• 17 years ago

They're like a real world parody of South Park with fewer taboos.

jacoblyles3• 17 years ago

I don't understand how it is hilarious, though I've been told my sense of humor is a bit odd.

Inflicting pain and embarrassment on complete strangers by stealing their log in information and violating their privacy - is that your idea of a good time?

Empathy pro-tip: ignore who the target was, and pretend the attack happened to someone close to you. How does that make you feel?

jrockway4• 17 years ago

How does that make you feel?

If my friend had a fake message posted under his or her account, I would probably not feel all that bad. The issue of password reuse aside, it is really not a big deal. "Haha, my account got hacked, I didn't actually have sex with him!" and that's the end of it.

Some people try to add wayyy too much meaning to their lives...

mburney• 17 years ago

We can't always align our sense of empathy with our sense of humor. Ever seen comedy movies or sitcoms where all kinds of embarrassing things happen to the characters as a result of malicious outside forces?

barrkel2• 17 years ago

By this logic, the Darwin Awards aren't funny either.

Yes, these people aren't culpable in the same way, yes it's a bad analogy, but it doesn't stop it from being funny.

spooneybarger2• 17 years ago

if it happened to someone close to me, it would still be simultaneously awful and hilarious.

dlytle• 17 years ago

Initially I got a laugh of out of some of the edits, because they were so ridiculous they almost couldn't be believed.

It stopped being funny once I saw the faked suicide note in one of the posted screenshots. Not like I'm surprised by anonymous internet pranksters crossing the line, of course.

eli4• 17 years ago

Mostly awful, though.

Nobody deserves that, even if you don't like them or don't agree with what they believe.

mrcharles• 17 years ago

Another solid reason why you should never use the same password for multiple sites. To do so, you are effectively trusting every single site in the chain.

I read enough HN and Codinghorror to know that many sites have no clue how to handle passwords in a secure fashion.

nailer• 17 years ago

I stupidly got caught out a few years ago when Reddit left all their passwords in plain text, and then got hacked. I was dumb enough to have been using the same password on Paypal at the time, not quite understanding how Paypal was linked to my bank account.

TheElder2• 17 years ago

Yes, that's the lesson everyone should take from these kinds of incidents. We all know not to do it, yet it's so easy to use the same password on multiple sites. Use this as a lesson to learn from.

nimaj• 17 years ago

This is why I like SuperGenPass (http://supergenpass.com/).

tvon2• 17 years ago

4Chan, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

(to borrow from Obi-Wan)

scythe• 17 years ago

12chan?

barrkel2• 17 years ago

As far as I am aware, 12chan just trades dodgy photos. 4chan seems more "hands-on".

ltbarcly3• 17 years ago

Yes, mocking people on the internet and making dirty jokes is certainly the pinnacle of human depravity. The KKK? Neo Nazi's? No, the most wretched people are giggling undergrads, sitting in dorms, trying to gross each other out.

And quoting Star Wars? - Go outside. - Walk to the library. - Read a book.

Repeat until you stop day dreaming about owning a light saber or riding shotgun with Han Solo.

gloob2• 17 years ago

I might be off base here, but I suspect the poster you replied to was attempting to be humorous, rather than expressing a philosophical truth about how 4chan users are actually the most evil thing in human history. Provided I'm correct, your response strikes me as a little like walking up to a six year old playing with a Rubik's cube and telling him how it was produced by slave labour in China. You might well be correct, but the context switch is rather jarring.

(edit: typo)

tvon2• 17 years ago

As gloob figured out, it was primarily a joke, though I find your vehement disgust with my use of a Star Wars quote to be a bit disturbing. Besides, sci-fi nerds generally read a lot so the library bit doesn't even make sense... and who wouldn't want to own a light saber (though I can't say it's something I actively daydream about)?

However, in defense of my statement, 4chan is the only place I've ever seen photos of a nude, decapitated woman posed in sexually suggestive positions, and it would probably take you 5 minutes of browsing /b/ to find drawings of girls under the age of 10 having sex.

(edit: typo)

benreesman• 17 years ago

God bless those little /b/tards.

TheElder2• 17 years ago

Your comment is childish, unnecessary and is liable to start flame wars.

vaksel• 17 years ago

/b/tards is what 4channers call themselves

DanielBMarkham5• 17 years ago

One of those jokes that's really funny -- as long as you're not the one getting trashed in public.

billswift• 17 years ago

If you wouldn't laugh at getting hacked like this yourself, then you really need to get a life.

ctbarna2• 17 years ago

The evidence of 4chan's involvement here is kind of shaky.

DanHulton2• 17 years ago

Christ NO, are you kidding? I was browsing 4chan when threads about this shit started going up. They are pretty clearly behind it.

I was just wondering when it would hit the MSM and then HN.

Not very long, it turns out.

pyre8• 17 years ago

4chan is just a message board. A forum if you will. Unless you're saying that the administrators had a hand in this, then '4chan' isn't behind it.

That's like saying that 'Hacker News' is behind something just because a bunch of Hacker News users used a thread to coordinate some sort of attack. 'Hacker News' isn't behind anything unless pg/ycombinator/etc somehow had a hand in it.

4chan is nothing but a medium for information shared between people. And to try and group the entire 4chan userbase under the term '4chan' is an effort in futility. There is a very wide and varied group of people that frequent 4chan. Keep in mind that many people visit 4chan without ever visiting /b/ or /r9k/.

ctbarna2• 17 years ago

My point was more that the article itself gave absolutely no evidence besides pointing out that a thing was happening and that there is a website called 4chan that does things like this.

I personally do not browse 4chan but the evidence in that article was kind of shaky.

gojomo• 17 years ago

Will 4Chan someday evolve into Vinge's 'Friends of Privacy', filling the net with lies to create doubt about all the revelations available online? (Personal info chaff, of a sort.)

('Friends of Privacy' is a anonymous mass group in Vinge's Rainbow's End.)

jff• 17 years ago

No, if anything they'd become the opposite of the 'Friends of Privacy'. I've browsed /b/ a bit; they like few things better than exposing the personal information on some personal vendetta or merely 'for the lulz'. I like lulz as much as the next guy, but phone harassment and impersonation are not so much lulz as simply criminal.

rossriley• 17 years ago

For those who haven't heard the story the details were pulled from a Christian dating site db.singles.org which had a query parameter injection vulnerability.

The vulnerability allowed you to navigate to a person's profile by entering the user id and skipping authentication.

Once you got there the change password form had the passwords in plain text. Someone wrote a scraper and now the entire database is on Mediafire and contains thousands of email/password combinations.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Thanks. Glad to see some actual info on the attack, as the real article and most comments in this thread are devoid of any.

noamsml2• 17 years ago

Ouch. SQL injections and plaintext passwords? Someone hired their nephew to do backend programming.

pbhj3• 17 years ago

Now we find out that HN is really full of the immature that think it's hilarious to break into peoples stuff and vandalise it, just to see if you can make them cry.

I genuinely thought people here would have more compassion and sense of decency than 4chan.

ekiru2• 17 years ago

While I think that breaking into people's stuff and vandalizing it is horrible, in the specific cases I've seen(such as the one in the article), no actual harm is done. All the victim has to do is change their password and inform people that someone else obtained their password and that they were not the ones who posted the untoward messages and photos. If the attackers have permanently taken the account by changing the password and email address, that solution is not possible, but then it's not really the scandalous posts that are the issue, is it?

profgubler• 17 years ago

Except you don't actually know that no harm was done. What if this person that this happened to was married (that is not a fun conversation to have even if it didn't happen), or because of what was posted they lost their job. You have no idea. I am sorry this isn't a joke it is vandalism.

jacoblyles3• 17 years ago

Human beings are a clannish people. Acting badly towards an unpopular group is seldom frowned upon. If the victims were some popular group, I am sure there would be outrage rather than lulz.

Two millenia later, Christians are the new Christians.

sho12• 17 years ago

"Acting badly towards an unpopular group is seldom frowned upon."

Your argument is disingenuous. Some groups are unpopular for good reason - because they do bad things, or make society worse for everyone else. When these groups are treated in a negative manner by society, it is proper and healthy, as it helps to discourage the groups spreading.

If you were to hear someone at a party loudly proclaiming the inherent criminal nature of blacks, would you afford him the normal respect upon encountering him later? Would you be terribly upset if you later heard that his web page had been hacked? I think not. He's not from just another group, one which happens to be randomly unpopular. He's from an inferior, dangerous, poisonous group and the more society can do to make such groups feel uncomfortable continuing in their ways, the better.

Christians, I'm afraid, are one of these groups. Even today, in 2009, they are continuing in their insane anti-science, anti-education campaign to throw the world back to the dark ages. Attempting to delegitimise evolution. Denying the fossil record and the age of the world, and by proxy all of geology, astronomy, and many other sciences. Campaigning against equal rights for gays. Opposing important medical research. Trying to weaken the boundary between (their) church and state. Encroaching on free expression. The list goes on and on.

It benefits society for damaging groups such as this to be reduced and one day eliminated. One of the tools we have to do this is that of humour/humiliation - to turn the group into a laughing stock. 4chan are simply the volunteer actors in this instance. You might not approve of their specific methods, but it's a job which needs to be done one way or the other and anything is better than nothing.

"Two millenia later, Christians are the new Christians."

Two millenia later, it's a disgrace upon humanity that there's still even such a thing as Christians. But yep - still whining.

eli4• 17 years ago

I'm hoping it's just because this is the weekend, and most of the real hackers have something better to do.

aw3c2• 17 years ago

As painful this might be for the victims, I enjoy when online social networks "explode" into people's faces like this.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

There is another thread in this article asking how I would feel if this happened to a friend. The answer is "I don't care". I thought a bit about how this would make me feel if it happened to me, and the answer is "I don't care, because I don't use Facebook".

I then thought about what would upset me, and I realized that I would be upset if someone edited my blog and added random technical inaccuracies.

Then I realized that I digitally sign all of my blog posts, so this is mathematically infeasible.

(Example post: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/App::Persistent.pod/raw)

noamsml2• 17 years ago

Unless you accidentally publish your private key online (longshot, but still).

sev• 17 years ago

If you read the replies on the screenshot, you notice the OP's sister posts a message (granted, we don't know if it's for sure the OP's sister, but it is implied). The interesting part is that the last name of the "sister" is not blurred, whereas the OP's is. Maybe she's married and has a different last name though.

eob• 17 years ago

Come on guys (and girls). 4Chan pranks on HN? Leave it for reddit.

Steve0• 17 years ago

This is the typical way to 'use' 4chan. One of the few guys there with a bit of knowledge breaks into something, gets a list and then his job is done. Post the list to 4chan and have that community wreak havok with it. 4Chan is a semi-intelligent botnet.

4Chan launches embarrassing attack on devout Christians on Facebook

Related Stories