AT&T; Confirms 4chan Block After DoS Attack

AT&T; on Monday confirmed that it temporarily blocked Internet forum 4chan over the weekend after one of its customers was hit with a denial-of-service attack linked to the site.

"Beginning Friday, an AT&T; customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org," AT&T; said in a statement. "To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T; customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T; temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers."

AT&T; denied that the block was related to the content on 4chan.

"Our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic," according to AT&T.;

AT&T; removed the block on Sunday night, after it determined that the denial-of-service threat no longer existed.

"We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers," AT&T; concluded.

Christopher "Moot" Poole, 4chan founder, confirmed AT&T;'s story, though he criticized the company for not giving 4chan any advance notice.

"For the past three weeks, 4chan has been under a constant DDoS attack," Poole wrote on his blog. "We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that was more or less transparent to the end user."

Some users, however, received errant traffic from one of 4chan's network switches, a "handful" of which were AT&T; customers.

"In the end, this wasn't a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T;'s part," Poole wrote. "Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably didn't anticipate [nor intend] the consequences of doing so."

Poole said he was glad that the issue prompted a renewed interest in Net neutrality and Internet censorship. "Perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise," he concluded.

Earlier this month, 4Chan was reportedly behind the popularity of the phrase "#gorillapenis" on Twitter's Trending Topic, an operation referred to as "Operation Sh*tter." In April, 4chan users hacked Time Magazine's "most influential person" poll.