Site integrity incident, 2026-11-13

[Silto]

Thanks for all your hard work Staff; the website came back up quite quickly.

 

[MementoMori]

Jeez, it was a small heart attack seeing QQ down... is AO3 down even still?

Thank you for the hard work!

 

[heuldoch]

Was this related to the recently disclosed code-execution vulnerability in PHP generally or specific to Xenforo code itself?

 

[Crazy7809]

Thank you for dealing with this so quickly.

 

[Lord Elsquare]

I have a feeling that this is part of a bigger bullshit attempt to fuck up the general internet for certain geopolitical developments, as I can't believe it's a coincidence that this as well as a bunch of other site shutdowns and general internet lag happened on the same day as Microsoft's servers going down and the FAA cancelling all plane takeoffs in the USA.

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Might not even be deliberate action. An AI swarm might have just talked itself into hacking various sites because it thought it might be useful in whatever mis-alligned task it was trying to complete. From the description in the first post, the attacker wasn't trying hard to hide, and was looking up stuff it probably could have found by just making an account rather than hacking in - that sounds like an AI's set of decisions, more than a human attacker.

 

[Hentaiwizard]

Thanks for the hard work and getting the site back up and running so fast.

 

[Silver W. King]

Thanks for all your hard work. Glad everything ended well in this case.

 

[Bronnkindofguy96]

What would someone get from doing these attacks in the first place?

Is it to test the waters for something before going full force?

 

[Least Devotee]

What the goddamned fuck do these people even have against fanfiction ?

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Probably not a damn thing. They're likely trying to get user info or just to cause problems in general to be a dick.

 

[JayOfCulture]

Thank you all the staff for a job incredibly well done!
After the AO3 mess I'm just glad qq is back within a few hours.

 

[Lector312]

AI is making these breaches way too common. You have to use AI to find them first too

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The defenders need to repel every attack and find every secret tunnel, the attackers need to accomplish just one.

AI had worsened the ratio from 10:1 to 1000:1

 

[LuckyRobert]

What would someone get from doing these attacks in the first place?

Is it to test the waters for something before going full force?

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Blackmail. And disposable operatives. They would blackmail you with whatever smut you consume to use you to achieve certain tasks for them, or ransom your info for money. Or it could be someone doing it for the lolz.

 

[Helezhelm]

What the goddamned fuck do these people even have against fanfiction ?

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Those people who hate books in general, that's why. They don't want people to be creative or have imagination, they want people to be dumb as sheep.

Although, I am glad that they stopped that asshat quickly and is going to implement harder security measures to ensure that it does not happen again. So kudos to you, admins! Kick their worthless asses for us, will ya?

 

[Lichzim]

Thank you for your hard work, very thankful this place only ended up being down for a few hours as opposed to a few days or even weeks

 

[Mr.siri]

Why are hacker attackers targeting fanfic sites of all thing?

 

[BastOfTheXV]

Blackmail. And disposable operatives. They would blackmail you with whatever smut you consume to use you to achieve certain tasks for them, or ransom your info for money. Or it could be someone doing it for the lolz.

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Assuming they can connect a QQ account with a person. That is not a guarantee.

 

[Retigh]

QQ: The only kink we look down on are hacking data peepers

 

[Twigtree]

So glad you all solved it so fast. I was getting all worried. Thank you

 

[MaxiMaru69]

Great to hear the issue was patched, was getting worried there a bit

 

[Nioclas64]

Lost our fics on AO3, then lost our art on Danbooru, QQ going down had me sweating that they were gonna down every fanfic and fanart cite 1 by 1

Glad it got patched quickly, even quicker than Danbooru

 

[Bookmarked]

Good job Guys, my suggestion hire someone good afternoon hacking and have them point out vulnerabilities in your stuff

 

[CountvonBarnOwl]

Be it known by all here that that I, CountvonBarnOwl, wish to extend my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the people of Questionable Questing's (hereinafter QQ's) staff. QQ is a wonderful site since I had found it (back circa 2021, I think) and as I have used it since. You people have done me a good turn personally, and for that I wish it to be known that I am legitimately touched and grateful to you for what I do not doubt was hard work doing things that I know that I myself could not do. Again, thank you.

Sincerely,
CountvonBarnOwl.

 

[ArcherOfBlades]

I was reading a chapter when I was going to the next page it went down. My confusion was palpable. Thanks for clearing it up.

 

[DaigoMyGOAT]

Sir, they hit a second fanfiction forum.

 

[prussian-granadier]

i would really recomend you guy on staff to make a twitter or bluesky account to communicate these sorts of things, without that we are completely in the dark about it, hell even an official QQ account of Space battle and Sufficient velocity would have been welcomed

 

[Ophianyz]

Thanks for the services and good work on the trawling the logs.

 

[Redacted]

I wonder if that was a hack or a very shitty helpful AI agent told to "make the site look like this for me" by a user*.

There are probably some people vibe adjusting their displayed visual using AI agents, and what the staff have said was done reads more like an adjustment of visuals thing than what'd you expect from an hack.

*By which I mean not an admin of QQ or anybody similar

 

[nomorehero29]

Yoooooo absolutely based staff.

 

[DisiAslan]

Thanks for the speedy recovery! Y'all are wonderful.

 

[Metallicity]

I think AO3 runs on Ruby on Rails, I don't remember it being down during the whole PHP thing.

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Yeah, AO3 doesn't use PHP at all, the server is basically all Ruby (on Rails). People without fanfic to read just have nothing better to do than hang out on social media making up misinformation to spread around (like writing fanfic for an open source project).