Imgur, the photo-sharing website, has been exploited in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the popular imageboards 4chan and 8chan.
The DDoS attack, first made public by an Imgur employee on Reddit, used Imgur links to send large amounts of traffic to the imageboards. When a user on Reddit's 4chan subreddit clicked on an Imgur link, the link opened a hidden window and loads tons of image files on the 4chan/8chan servers. This slowed down traffic to the servers and weakened the sites.
The Imgur employee who described the attack said that while Imgur wasn't hacked, the company did find an exploit in its code that aided the attack. “Someone managed to upload an HTML file with malicious JavaScript inside of it that targeted 8chan,” the employee wrote. “We patched this bug and it's no longer possible to upload those files. We're also not [serving] those bad files anymore.”
Imgur notes it's still important to take precautionary steps and clear your browser's cache, including browser data and cookies.
