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Lerer Ventures Hires 4chan Founder Christopher Poole As An Advisor

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:24:51 +0000

4chan founder Christopher Poole (known as Moot) is joining Lerer Ventures, a New York City seed funding company started by Ken Lerer and Ben Lerer. He is not a formal partner, but he was be instrumental in greenlighting certain deals. Other advisors include Eric Hippeau (Huffington Post CEO) and Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed CEO).

Ben Lerer, Ken’s son, is the CEO and founder of Thrillist while Ken is the chairman of The Huffington Post. “Like everyone else at Lerer,” said Poole, “I’m primarily focused on building my company, but I view my participation in the fund as a way to stay current as the world changes and invest in my peers who are doing amazing things.” Some of the investments that Lerer Ventures invested in include BankSimple, chartbeat, betaworks, gdgt, Greplin, and Canvas Networks.

[TechCrunch]

Tumblr and 4chan In A DDoS Attack War

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 04:37:57 +0000

Tumblr and 4Chan are in the middle of a DDoS attack war. Users at 4Chan and Tumblr have been attacking each other’s servers. 4Chan was down today and it is a possibility that Tumblr decided to push up their attack time to earlier. Tumblr founder David Karp said “As always, we’re aggressively suspending any accounts encouraging DoS attacks or other illegal behavior.” The conflict between the two took place when a 4chan user accused Tumblr users of stealing meme ideas from their forum boards. Check out the DDoS attack war graphics below:

[TechCrunch]

4chan Takes Down RIAA Website

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 03:24:17 +0000

Earlier this week 4chan took down the MPAA website and now the group known as “Anonymous” has taken down the RIAA website as part of “Operation Payback.”

4chan users coordinated a massive DDoS attack to take down the MPAA and AiPlex Software website. AiPlex boasted once that they have been able to launch attacks on torrent websites to take them down. 4chan started “Operation Payback” to retaliate against the Indian software company AiPlex, the RIAA, and the MPAA.

Even people who have never been on the 4chan forums have been able to participate on the attack by downloading Low Orbit Ion Cannons software and following some instructions.

[TorrentFreak]

4chan Users Takes Down MPAA Website

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:30:07 +0000

4chan users have coordinated an attack against The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) website. The assault on the MPAA website is suspected to be in retaliation to an Indian tech firm that bragged about how they launched similar attacks on several torrent websites. The following message appeared on 4chan before the attack took place:

We target the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG! The IP is designated at “216.20.162.10?, and our firing time remains THE SAME. All details are just as before, but we have reaimed our crosshairs on this much larger target. We have the manpower, we have the botnets, it’s time we do to them what they keep doing to us.
REPEAT: AIPLEX IS ALREADY DOWN THANKS TO A SINGLE ANON. WE ARE MIGRATING TARGETS.

4chan was able to take down MPAA using the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) tactic. After installing LOIC, anyone can repeatedly ping a website. But the hard part is being able to bring a group of people together to do it at once. 4chan is one of the few websites out there that can coordinate such an attack.

[Gawker]

YouTube Hit With 4Chan Attack

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:42:58 +0000

4chan is a forum where hackers make designated online attacks on celebrities and popular services. Recently 4chan users were notified about Salma Hayek’s MobileMe Account login information. 4chan users also built a Twitter bot that gathered thousands of followers in an attempt to beat Ashton Kutcher and CNN to the first million followers. This time 4chan users decided to attack YouTube.

Anyone that searched for Hannah Montana or Jonas Brothers may have noticed some inappropriate content show up. 4chan planned this attack on YouTube as a protest against the removal of audio from copyrighted music videos. Some of the links connected to those videos were linked to websites that asked visitors to download malware too.

Google responded quickly in removing the offensive videos but warned that there could be a few videos left. About 20 hours of video are added to YouTube per minute so it is difficult to keep tabs on every single video being uploaded.

[via TechWorld]

Salma Hayek’s Apple MobileMe Account Gets Taken Over

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:40:56 +0000

Apple MobileMe is a way to sync e-mail, contacts, and calendars with applications with different devices. The login details for actress Salma Hayek has been hacked and the information has been leaked to everyone on the 4chan forum. It sounds like that the hacking was a joint effort between between EBaum and Anontalk and then posted on 4chan. Regardless of who did it, the person did got the password with little effort on their part. After he or she logged into Hayek’s account, the anonymous person changed the login details and made this posting:

Her email address is shayek@mac.com
Go to me.com, forgot password, type shayek@mac.com
Her birthday is Sept. 2
Answer to change password question is: frida

The hacker guessed the ID by assuming that most Apple IDs are commonly the first letter of the first name and the whole last name followed by @mac.com. Then the hacker used the Forgot Password feature and found the answer on Hayek’s Wikipedia page which had to do with her birth date. Fortunately for Hayek, there is nothing incriminating in her Mac e-mail account.

This makes me question the whole security question standard that is asked when a password is forgotten is not good enough. Sometimes the questions are too obvious. For example, when David Kernell hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account, all he did was guess the security questions. The questions had to do about where Palin went to high school, where she met her husband (the same high school), birth date, and zip code.

[via ElectronicPulp]

4chan Gets Into 1 Million Twitter Follow Craze

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:38:13 +0000

Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and CNNbrk are all competing with hitting one million followers on Twitter first. Now discussion board website 4chan wants to get it on the action by creating a script that allows users to create thousands of fake Twitter accounts and make them follow a specific user.

“Honestly, if either of them win, the entire internet f**king loses,” stated a user on the 4chan. “What say we miraculously beat them to the punch with an all-new account?” The Twitter account being used is called basementdad which is named after Josef Fritzl in Austria. Fritzl is the man who was charged for sexually abusing his own daughter in his basement for over 24 years. So far the basementdad account has over 30,000 users.

“We’re aware of it and we’re monitoring the situation,” stated Del Harvey, who oversees abuse on Twitter. “It’s not just one person.” This is the first time that adding a million users to a specific Twitter account using scripts has been attempted.

Palin’s E-mail Hacker Revealed To Be University of Tennessee Student, David Kernell

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:06:32 +0000

David Kernell is a student at the University of Tennessee and the son of Democratic Tennessee state representative, Mike Kernell. It turns out that David is suspected to be the one that hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and posted the username and password on 4chan.org. After midnight on Sunday, the FBI conducted a search in his apartment where a party was taking place. Kernell and several others fled from the scene before the FBI reached the premises.

However, three of Kernell’s roommates have been given a subpoena. The three of them will have to appear in a court in Chattanooga. No charges have been filed against Kernell yet.

If David Kernell was actually involved with the hacking of Sarah Palin’s e-mail, he then acted as the owner of the Yahoo! Mail account, gov.palin@yahoo.com and answered the security questions linked to a forgotten password request. Then Kernell reset Palin’s e-mail to “popcorn.” Kernell used the e-mail address, rubico10@yahoo.com to post the username and password of Palin on 4chan. After posting that information, screenshots of Palin’s e-mail appeared all over the web.

What do you get when you hack into the Vice President hopeful’s e-mail? Potentially a misdemeanor as a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Kernell would face little or no time in prison according to Wired.com. Bill O’Reilly of FOX’s The O’Reilly Factor heavily criticized the hackers on of his recent episodes and saw his own website hacked shortly after.