Interesting they would choose 8chan. But then again, maybe it's a test run? Take a semi-popular site then when it works there (assuming the discovery wasn't made) then try something bigger like Facebook?
It was just announced yesterday that Hiroyuki Nishimura (founder of 2chan) is the new owner of 4chan. There are past disputes with the owner of 8chan (Jim Watkins) and Nisimura mainly due to monetizing the site (2chan).
It could be an effort to stifle 8chan in an attempt to drive users to 4chan so that it can be better monetized by Nishimura.
>After 8chan received a surge of new users, founder Fredrick "hotwheels" Brennan worked out a deal to have its content hosted by the same folks who hosted 2channel's imageboards. Last week, Brennan confirmed that he is no longer 8chan's owner but instead a paid administrator, which he claimed was due to domain-name transfers and the fact that the financial and technical support offered by the site's current owner, Jim Watkins, is the reason the site has not yet shut down.
>Watkins' name figures into the story for another reason: he wrested administrative control of 2channel away from Nishimura in 2014. The site had already been run on American servers to bypass more restrictive Japanese content laws, and imageboard users have alleged that this change of ownership occurred, in part, due to how Nishimura handled—and possibly sold—users' private data. Nishimura has yet to speak on the record about such allegations, though we imagine he'll receive questions about those and his 2channel breakup during an official 4chan Q&A on Tuesday, September 22, at 8pm EST.
8chan has actually been the victim of a number of increasingly sophisticated attacks, all of which have detailed and interesting postmortems.
I also would like to know why 8chan specifically, but it does appear that they are the primary target for someone.
The only answer I can come up off the top of my head (not the GG paranoia nonsense) is that someone is doing it for kicks to tick off users of other boards on 8ch. Basically, denying access to whatever was being posted is enough to send some folks over the edge just to see them act like fools in IRC seems to be entertainment for some folks. Basically, trolls. shrugs
I just find it weird that it's flaring up now is all. There were a couple DDoS attacks I think around December last year (ircc).