4Chan vandalises Tea Party website, reveals private donors -

Ultra-right-wing lunatic circle-jerk 

The Tea Party has had its PAC website hacked by what looks like a legion of users from the notorious 4Chan image board.

Infamous for the chaotic /b/ forum, which spawns much of the internet's memes, a well-known adage around the web is '4Chan is leaking'. This time it looks like it leaked all over the Tea Party's independencehallteapartypac.com. At time of publication, the website flashed a vertical row of animated gifs of an animal appearing to rub its genitals, before redirecting to a Facebook user called "Dillon Tilly".

Reddit user kevipapo1 noticed that a full list of private donors had also been leaked and copied it to Pastebin.

Since the hack, the page also claimed the attack was from 9Gag.com - a widely mocked meme website whose members hold a vendetta against 4Chan and are constantly locked in a losing fight against it. Later it was changed to claim the attack was from Reddit.com, which itself has become a popular target for the right wing media, so many of its members are eagerly awaiting the Fox News reports. 

The full 4Chan thread can be read here but it should be considered fully not safe for work, or life, and we have no responsibility for the eye or mind bleach you may need after clicking through. 

Graham Cluley at Sophos pointed out that this seems to instead be a website set up for a regional division of the Tea Party.

Speaking to TechEye, he said that the website is still compromised and presumably under the control of hackers. "As such," Cluley said, "someone with malicious intentions could plant malware on the site which could attempt to infect visiting internet users. The website has probably had more traffic in the last several hours than its entire existence, so let's hope that graffiti is as bad as it gets rather than something more sinister."

"We aren't able to confirm the claim that the website was only protected with a password of "p9ssw0rd" but that obviously is a very poor choice if you want to secure your site," Cluley said.

"Whatever size of website you run, you should be choosing a password or passphrase that is hard to guess, unique and unlikely to be in the dictionaries of common passwords that hackers frequently use. In addition, you should make sure that your website is coded securely to avoid vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit and kept up-to-date with security patches," he said.